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They look him over as if he were a fresh air child being 
given a day's outing. 



LOVE 
CONQUERS ALL 

BY 

ROBERT C. BENCHLEY 



ILLUSTRATED BY 

GLUYAS WILLIAMS 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1922 






aU^ 



Copyright, 1922, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
Printed October, ig22 



PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 

OCT 28 '?? 



©C1A683926 



ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

The author thanks the editors of the following 
publications for their permission to print the articles 
in this book: Life, The New York World, The New 
York Tribune, The Detroit Athletic Club News, and 
The Consolidated Press Association. 



Ill 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I The Benchley-Whittier Corre- 
spondence 3 

n Family Life in America 

Part 1 8 

Part 2 lo 

Part 3 II 

in This Child Knows the Answer — 

Do You? 13 

IV Rules and Suggestions for Watch- 
ing Auction Bridge 16 

V A Christmas Spectacle 23 

VI How to Watch a Chess Match . 29 

Vn WATcmNG Baseball 35 

Vm How TO Be a Spectator at Spring 

Planting 41 

DC The Manhattador 47 

X What to Do While the Family 

Is Away 50 

XI "Roll Your Own" 56 

Xn Do Insects Think? 62 

XIII The Score in the Stands 65 

XIV Mid- Winter Sports 70 

XV Reading the Funnies Aloud ... 74 

XVI Opera Synopses 

I Die Meister-Genossenschaft . 78 

n H Minnestrone 82 

III Lucy de Lima 84 

V 



CONTENTS 



XVII 

XVIII 

XIX 

XX 

XXI 

XXII 

XXIII 

XXIV 

XXV 

XXVI 

XXVII 

XXVIII 

XXIX 

XXX 

XXXI 

XXXII 
XXXIII 
XXXIV 



XXXV 



XXXVI 

XXXVII 

XXXVIII 



PAGE 

The Young Idea's Shooting Gallery 87 

Polyp With a Past 92 

Holt! Who Goes There? 96 

The Committee on the Whole . . 100 
Noting an Increase in Bigamy . . 104 
The Real Wiglaf: Man and Mon- 
arch 108 

Facing the Boys' Camp Problem . 113 

All About the Silesian Problem . 116 
Happy the Home Where Books 

Are Found 120 

When Not in Rome, Why Do as 

THE Romans Did? 124 

The Tooth, the Whole Tooth, and 

Nothing But the Tooth .... 131 

Malignant Mirrors 144 

The Power of the Press 148 

Home for the Holidays 150 

How to Understand International 

Finance 157 

'TwAS the Night Before Sltmmer 160 

Welcome Home — and Shut Up . . 168 
Animal Stories 

I Georgia Dog 174 

II Lillian Mosquito 178 

The Tariff Unmasked ...... 182 

LITERARY DEPARTMENT 

" Take Along A Book " 187 

Confessions of a Chess Champion. 190 

"Rip Van Winkle" 195 

vi 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XXXIX Literary Lost and Found Dept. . 200 

XL "Darkwater" 206 

XLI The New Time-Table- 211 

XLII Mr. Bok's Americanization .... 216 

XLIII Zane Grey's Movie 221 

XLIV Suppressing "Jurgen'* 227 

XLV Anti-Ibanez 231 

XL VI On Bricklaying 236 

XL VII "American Anniversaries" .... 241 

XLVIII A Week-end With Wells .... 245 

XLIX About Portland Cement 249 

L Open Bookcases 253 

LI Trout-Fishing 257 

LII "Scouting For Girls" 261 

LIII How TO Sell Goods 265 

LLV "You!" 270 

LV The Catalogue School 274 

LVI "Effective House Organs" ... 277 

LVII Advice to Writers 282 

LVIII "The Effective Speaking Voice" . 286 
LIX Those Dangerously Dynamic Brit- 
ish Girls 291 

LX Books and Other Things 294 

LXI "Measure Your Mind" 298 

LXII The Brow-Elevation in Humor . 303 

LXIII Business Letters 307 



vu 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

They look him over as if he were a fresh air child 

being given a day's outing Frontispiece 



FACING PAGE 



The watcher walks around the table, giving each 

hand a careful scrutiny i8 

*' 'Round and 'round the tree I go" 26 

"Atta boy, forty-nine: Only one more to go!" . 44 

For three hours there is a great deal of screaming . 60 

He was further aided by the breaks of the game . 72 

Mrs. Deemster didn't enter into the spirit of the 

thing at all 90 

"That's right," says the chairman 102 

''If you weren't asleep what were you doing with 

your eyes closed?" 122 

You would gladly change places with the most law- 
less of God's creatures 140 

I am mortified to discover that the unpleasant 

looking man is none other than myself . . . 146 

*'I can remember you when you were that high" 154 

She would turn away and bite her lip 162 

"Listen Ed! This is how it goes!" 212 

They intimate that I had better take my few 
pennies and run 'round the corner to some little 
haberdashery 266 

I thank them and walk in to the nearest dining- 
room table 254 

"Why didn't you tell us that you were reading a 

paper on birth control?" 292 



IX 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 



THE BENCHLEY-WHITTIER CORRE- 
SPONDENCE 

OLD scandals concerning the private life of Lord 
Byron have been revived with the recent 
publication of a collection of his letters. One of 
the big questions seems to be: Did Byron send Mary 
Shelley^ s letter to Mrs, R. B, Hoppner? Everyone 
seems greatly excited about it. 

Lest future generations be thrown into turmoil 
over my correspondence after I am gone, I want right 
now to clear up the mystery which has puzzled 
literary circles for over thirty years. I need 
hardly add that I refer to what is known as the 
" Benchley-Whittier Correspondence." 

The big question over which both my biographers 
and Whittier's might possibly come to blows is this, 
as I understand it: Did John Greenleaf Whittier ever 
receive the letters I wrote to him in the late Fall 
of 1890? // he did not, who did? And under 
what circumstances were they written? 

I was a very young man at the time, and Mr. 
Whittier was, naturally, very old. There had been 

[3] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

a meeting of the Save-Our-Song-Birds Club in old 
Dane Hall (now demolished) in Cambridge, Massa- 
chusetts. Members had left their coats and hats 
in the check-room at the foot of the stairs (now 
demolished). 

In passing out after a rather spirited meeting, 
during the course of which Mr. Whittier and Dr. 
Van Blarcom had opposed each other rather violently 
over the question of Baltimore orioles, the aged poet 
naturally was the first to be helped into his coat. 
In the general mix-up (there was considerable good- 
natured fooling among the members as they left, 
relieved as they were from the strain of the 
meeting) Whittier was given my hat by mistake. 
When I came to go, there was nothing left for me 
but a rather seedy gray derby with a black band, 
containing the initials '^ J. G. W." As the poet was 
visiting in Cambridge at the time I took opportunity 
next day to write the following letter to him: 

Cambridge, Mass. 
November 7, 1890. 
Dear Mr. Whittier: 

I am afraid that in the confusion following the 
Save-Our-Song-Birds meeting last night, you were 
given my hat by mistake. I have yours and will 

[4] 



THE CORRESPONDENCE 

gladly exchange it if you will let me know when I 
may call on you. 

May I not add that I am a great admirer of your 
verse? Have you ever tried any musical comedy 
lyrics? I think that I could get you in on the 
ground floor in the show game, as I know a young 
man who has written several songs which E. E. 
Rice has said he would like to use in his next 
comic opera — provided he can get words to go 
with them. 

But we can discuss all this at our meeting, 
which I hope will be soon, as your hat looks like 
hell on me. 

Yours respectfully, 

Robert C. Benchley. 

I am quite sure that this letter was mailed, as 
I find an entry in my diary of that date which 
reads: 

"Mailed a letter to J. G. Whittier. Cloudy 
and cooler." 

Furthermore, in a death-bed confession, some 
ten years later, one Mary F. Rourke, a servant 
employed in the house of Dr. Agassiz, with whom 
Whittier was bunking at the time, admitted that 
she herself had taken a letter, bearing my name in 

[5] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

the corner of the envelope, to the poet at his break- 
fast on the following morning. 

But whatever became of it after it fell into his 
hands, I received no reply. I waited five days, dur- 
ing which time I stayed in the house rather than go 
out wearing the Whittier gray derby. On the sixth 
day I wrote him again, as follows: 

Cambridge, Mass. 
Nov. 14, 1890. 
Dear Mr. Whittier: 
How about that hat of mine? 
Yours respectfully, 

Robert C. Benchley. 

I received no answer to this letter either. Con- 
cluding that the good gray poet was either too busy 
or too gosh-darned mean to bother with the thing, 
I myself adopted an attitude of supercilious uncon- 
cern and closed the correspondence with the fol- 
lowing terse message: 

Cambridge, Mass. 
December 4, 1890. 
Dear Mr. Whittier: 

It is my earnest wish that the h^t of mine which 
you are keeping will slip down over your eyes some 
day, interfering with your vision to such an 

[6] 



THE CORRESPONDENCE 

extent that you will walk off the sidewalk into the 
gutter and receive painful, albeit superficial, injuries. 

Your young friend, 

Robert C. Benchley. 

Here the matter ended so far as I was concerned, 
and I trust that biographers in the future will not 
let any confusion of motives or misunderstanding 
of dates enter into a clear and unbiased state- 
ment of the whole affair. We must not have an- 
other Shelley-Byron scandal. 



[7] 



II 

FAMILY LIFE IN AMERICA 
Part i 

The naturalistic literature of this country has reached 
such a state that no family of characters is considered 
true to life which does not include at least two hypo- 
chondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills 
food down the front of his vest. If this school pro- 
gresses, the following is what we may expect in our 
national literature in a year or so. 

THE living-room in the Twillys' house was so 
damp that thick, soppy moss grew all over 
the walls. It dripped on the picture of Grand- 
father Twilly that hung over the melodeon, making 
streaks down the dirty glass like sweat on the old 
man^s face. It was a mean face. Grandfather 
Twilly had been a mean man and had little spots 
of soup on the lapel of his coat. All his children 
were mean and had soup spots on their clothes. 

Grandma Twilly sat in the rocker over by the 
window, and as she rocked the chair snapped. It 
sounded like Grandma Twilly's knees snapping as 
they did whenever she stooped over to pull the 
wings off a fly. She was a mean old thing. Her 
knuckles were grimy and she chewed crumbs that 

[8] 



FAMILY LIFE IN AMERICA 

she found in the bottom of her reticule. You would 
have hated her. She hated herself. But most of 
all she hated Grandfather Twilly. 

" I certainly hope you're frying good," she mut- 
tered as she looked up at his picture. 

" Hasn't the undertaker come yet, Ma? " asked 
young Mrs. Wilbur Twilly petulantly. She was 
boiling water on the oil-heater and every now and 
again would spill a little of the steaming liquid on 
the baby who was playing on the floor. She hated 
the baby because it looked like her father. The 
hot water raised little white blisters on the baby's 
red neck and Mabel Twilly felt short, sharp twinges 
of pleasure at the sight. It was the only pleasure 
she had had for four months. 

" Why don't you kill yourself. Ma? " she con- 
tinued. " You're only in the way here and you 
know it. It's just because you're a mean old woman 
and want to make trouble for us that you hang on." 

Grandma Twilly shot a dirty look at her daugh- 
ter-in-law. She had always hated her. Stringy 
hair, Mabel had. Dank, stringy hair. Grandma 
Twilly thought hoW it would look hanging at an 
Indian's belt. But all that she did was to place her 
tongue against her two front teeth and make a noise 
like the bath-room faucet. 

[9] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Wilbur Twilly was reading the paper by the oil 
lamp. Wilbur had watery blue eyes and cigar ashes 
all over his knees. The third and fourth buttons of 
his vest were undone. It was too hideous. 

He was conscious of his family seated in chairs 
about him. His mother, chewing crumbs. His 
wife Mabel, with her stringy hair, reading. His 
sister Bernice, with projecting front teeth, who sat 
thinking of the man who came every day to take 
away the waste paper. Bernice was wondering 
how long it would be before her family would dis- 
cover that she had been married to this man for 
three years. 

How Wilbur hated them all. It didn't seem as 
if he could stand it any longer. He wanted to 
scream and stick pins into every one of them and 
then rush out and see the girl who worked in his 
office snapping rubber-bands all day. He hated her 
too, but she wore side-combs. 

Part 2 

The street was covered with slimy mud. It oozed 
out from under Bernice's rubbers in unpleasant 
bubbles until it seemed to her as if she must kill 
herself. Hot air coming out from a steam laundry. 
Hot, stifling air. Bernice didn't work in the laundry 

[10] 



FAMILY LIFE IN AMERICA 

but she wished that she did so that the hot air 
would kill her. She wanted to be stifled. She 
needed torture to be happy. She also needed a good 
swift clout on the side of the face. 

A drunken man lurched out from a door-way and 
flung his arms about her. It was only her husband. 
She loved her husband. She loved him so much 
that, as she pushed him away and into the gutter, 
she stuck her little finger into his eye. She also 
untied his neck-tie. It was a bow neck-tie, with 
white, dirty spots on it and it was wet with gin. It 
didn't seem as if Bernice could stand it any longer. 
All the repressions of nineteen sordid years behind 
protruding teeth surged through her untidy soul. 
She wanted love. But it was not her husband that 
she loved so fiercely. It was old Grandfather Twilly. 
And he was too dead. 



Part 3 

In the dining-room of the Twillys' house every- 
thing was very quiet. Even the vinegar-cruet which 
was covered with fly-specks. Grandma Twilly lay 
with her head in the baked potatoes, poisoned by 
Mabel, who, in her turn had been poisoned by her 
husband and sprawled in an odd posture over the 
china-closet. Wilbur and his sister Bernice had 

[II] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

just finished choking each other to death and be- 
tween them completely covered the carpet in that 
corner of the room where the worn spot showed the 
bare boards beneath, like ribs on a chicken carcass. 

Only the baby survived. She had a mean face 
and had great spillings of Imperial Granum down 
her bib. As she looked about her at her family, a 
great hate surged through her tiny body and her 
eyes snapped viciously. She wanted to get down 
from her high-chair and show them all how much 
she hated them. 

Bernice's husband, the man who came after the 
waste paper, staggered into the room. The tips 
were off both his shoe-lacings. The baby experi- 
enced a voluptuous sense of futility at the sight of 
the tipless-lacings and leered suggestively at her 
uncle-in-law. 

" We must get the roof- fixed," said the man, very 
quietly. '' It lets the sun in." 



[12] 



Ill 

THIS CHILD KNOWS THE ANSWER — 

DO YOU? 

WE are occasionally confronted in the adver- 
tisements by the picture of an offensively 
bright-looking little boy, fairly popping with in- 
formation^ who, it is claimed in the text, knows all 
the inside dope on why fog forms in beads on a 
woolen coat, how long it would take to crawl to the 
moon on your hands and knees, and what makes 
oysters so quiet. 

The taunting catch-line of the advertisement is: 
" This Child Knows the Answer — Do You? " and 
the idea is to shame you into buying a set of books 
containing answers to all the questions in the world 
except the question '' Where is the money coming 
from to buy the books? " 

Any little boy knowing all these facts would un- 
questionably be an asset in a business which special- 
ized in fog-beads or lunar transportation novelties, 
but he would be awful to have about the house. 

" Spencer," you might say to him, " where are 
Daddy's slippers? " To which he would undoubt- 

[13] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

edly answer: "I don't know, Dad,'^ (disagreeable 
little boys like that always call their fathers ^' Dad " 
and stand with their feet wide apart and their hands 
in their pockets like girls playing boys' roles on the 
stage) " but I do know this, that all the Nordic 
peoples are predisposed to astigmatism because of 
the glare of the sun on the snow, and that, further- 
more, if you were to place a common ordinary mar- 
ble in a glass of luke-warm cider there would be a 
precipitation which, on pouring off the cider, would 
be found to be what we know as parsley, just plain 
parsley which Cook uses every night in preparing 
our dinner." 

With little ones like this around the house, a 
new version of " The Children's Hour " will have 
to be arranged, and it might as well be done now 
and got over with. 

The Well-informed Children's Hour 

Between the dark and the day-light. 
When the night is beginning to lower, 
Comes a pause in the day's occupation 
Which is known as the children's hour. 
'Tis then appears tiny Irving 
With the patter of little feet. 
To tell us that worms become dizzy 
At a slight application of heat. 

[14] 



THIS CHILD KNOWS THE ANSWER 

And Norma, the baby savant, 
Comes toddling up with the news 
That a valvular catch in the lar3mx 
Is the reason why Kitty mews. 
" Oh Grandpa,' ' cries lovable Lester, 
" Jack Frost has surprised us again, 
By condensing in crystal formation 
The vapor which clings to the pane! " 
Then Roger and Lispinard Junior 
Race pantingly down through the hall 
To be first with the hot information 
That bees shed their coats in the Fall. 
No longer they clamor for stories 
As they cluster in fun 'round my knee 
But each little darling is bursting 
With a story that he must tell me. 
Giving reasons why daisies are sexless 
And what makes the turtle so dour; 
So it goes through the horrible gloaming 
Of the Well-Informed Children's Hour. 



[15] 



IV 

RULES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR WATCH- 
ING AUCTION BRIDGE 

WITH all the expert advice that is being 
offered in print these days about how to 
play games, it seems odd that no one has formu- 
lated a set of rules for the spectators. The specta- 
tors are much more numerous than the players, 
and seem to need more regulation. As a spectator 
of twenty years standing, versed in watching all 
sports except six-day bicycle races, I offer the fruit 
of my experience in the form of suggestions and 
reminiscences which may tend to clarify the situa- 
tion, or, in case there is no situation which needs 
clarifying, to make one. 

In the event of a favorable reaction on the part 
of the public, I shall form an, association, to be 
known as the National Amateur Audience Associa- 
tion (or the N. A. A. A., if you are given to slang) 
of which I shall be Treasurer. That's all I ask, the 
Treasurership. 

This being an off-season of the year for outdoor 
sports (except walking, which is getting to have 

[i6] 



WATCHING AUCTION BRIDGE 

neither participants nor spectators) it seems best 
to start with a few remarks on the strenuous occu- 
pation of watching a bridge game. Bridge-watchers 
are not so numerous as football watchers, for in- 
stance, but they are much more in need of coordi- 
nation and it will be the aim of this article to formu- 
late a standardized set of rules for watching bridge 
which may be taken as a criterion for the whole 
country. 

Number Who May Watch 

There should not be more than one watcher for 
each table. When there are two, or more, confusion 
is apt to result and no one of the watchers can devote 
his attention to the game as it should be devoted. 
Two watchers are also likely to bump into each 
other as they make their way around the table 
looking over the players' shoulders. If there are 
more watchers than there are tables, two can share 
one table between them, one being dummy while 
the other watches. In this event the first one should 
watch until the hand has been dealt and six tricks 
taken, being relieved by the second one for the re- 
maining tricks and the marking down of the score. 



[17] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Preliminaries 

In order to avoid any charge of signalling, it will 
be well for the following conversational formula to 
be used before the game begins: 

The ring-leader of the game says to the fifth 
person: ''Won't you join the game and make a 
fourth? I have some w^ork which I really ought 
to be doing." 

The fifth person replies: "Oh, no, thank you! I 
play a wretched game. I'd much rather sit here 
and read, if you don't mind." 

To which the ring-leader replies: "Pray do." 

After the first hand has been dealt, the fifth 
person, whom we shall now call the " watcher," puts 
down the book and leans forward in his (or her) 
chair, craning the neck to see what is in the hand 
nearest him. The strain becoming too great, he 
arises and approaches the table, saying: " Do you 
mind if I watch a bit? " 

No answer need be given to this, unless someone 
at the table has nerve enough to tell the truth. 

Procedure 

The game is now on. The watcher walks around 
the table, giving each hand a careful scrutiny, groan- 
ing slightly at the sight of a poor one and making 

[18] 



WATCHING AUCTION BRIDGE 

noises of joyful anticipation at the good ones. Stop- 
ping behind an especially unpromising array of cards, 
it is well to say: ^' Well, unlucky at cards, lucky 
in love, you know." This gives the partner an 
opportunity to judge his chances on the bid he is 
about to make, and is perfectly fair to the other 
side, too, for they are not left entirely in the dark. 
Thus everyone benefits by the remark. 

When the bidding begins, the watcher has con- 
siderable opportunity for effective work. Having 
seen how the cards lie, he is able to stand back 
and listen with a knowing expression, laughing 
at unjustified bids and urging on those who 
should, in his estimation, plunge. At the con- 
clusion of the bidding he should say: " Well, 
we're off! " 

As the hand progresses and the players become 
intent on the game, the watcher may be the cause 
of no little innocent diversion. He may ask one of 
the players for a match, or, standing behind the one 
who is playing the hand, he may say: 

" I'll give you three guesses as to whom I ran into 
on the street yesterday. Someone you all know. 
Used to go to school with you, Harry . . . Light 
hair and blue eyes . . . Medium build . . . Well, 
sir, it was Lew Milliken. Yessir, Lew Milliken. 
Hadn't seen him for fifteen years. Asked after you, 

[19] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Harry . . . and George too. And what do you 
think he told me about Chick? " 

Answers may or may not be returned to these 
remarks, according to the good nature of the players, 
but in any event, they serve their purpose of dis- 
traction. 

Particular care should be taken that no one of 
the players is allowed to make a mistake. The 
watcher, having his mind free, is naturally in a 
better position to keep track of matters of sequence 
and revoking. Thus, he may say: 

" The lead was over here, George," or 

" I think that you refused spades a few hands 
ago, Lillian." 

Of course, there are some watchers who have an 
inherited delicacy about offering advice or talking 
to the players. Some people are that way. They 
are interested in the game, and love to watch but 
they feel that they ought not to interfere. I had 
a cousin who just wouldn't talk while a hand was 
being played, and so, as she had to do something, 
she hummed. She didn't hum very well, and her 
program was limited to the first two lines of " How 
Firm a Foundation," but she carried it off very w^ell 
and often got the players to humming it along with 
her. She could also drum rather well with her 
fingers on the back of the chair of one of the players 

[20] 



WATCHING AUCTION BRIDGE 

while looking over his shoulder. " How Firm a 
Foundation " didn't lend itself very well to drum- 
ming; so she had a little patrol that she worked up 
all by herself, beginning soft, like a drum corps in 
the distance, and getting louder and louder, finally 
dying away again so that you could barely hear it. 
It was wonderful how she could do it — and still 
go on living. 

Those who feel this way about talking while others 
are playing bridge have a great advantage over my 
cousin and her class if they can play the piano. 
They play ever so softly, in order not to disturb, 
but somehow or other you just know that they are 
there, and that the next to last note in the coda is 
going to be very sour. 

But, of course, the piano work does not technically 
come under the head of watching, although when 
there are two watchers to a table, one may go over 
to the piano while she is dummy. 

But your real watcher will allow nothing to inter- 
fere with his conscientious following of the game, 
and it is for real watchers only that these sugges- 
tions have been formulated. The minute you get 
out of the class of those who have the best interests 
of the game at heart, you become involved in dilet- 
tantism and amateurishness, and the whole sport of 
bridge-watching falls into disrepute. 

[21] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

The only trouble with the game as it now stands 
is the risk of personal injury. This can be elimi- 
nated by the watcher insisting on each player being 
frisked for weapons before the game begins and 
cultivating a good serviceable defense against ordi- 
nary forms of fistic attack. 



[22] 



V 

A CHRISTMAS SPECTACLE 

For Use in Christmas Eve Entertainments in the 

Vestry 

AT the opening of the entertainment the Super- 
intendent will step into the footlights, recover 
his balance apologetically, and say: 

" Boys and girls of the Intermediate Department, 
parents and friends: I suppose you all know why 
we are here tonight. (At this point the audience 
will titter apprehensively). Mrs. Drury and her 
class of little girls have been working very hard 
to make this entertainment a success, and I am sure 
that everyone here to-night is going to have what 
I overheard one of my boys the other day calling 
'some good time.' (Indulgent laughter from the 
little boys). And may I add before the curtain goes 
up that immediately after the entertainment we 
want you all to file out into the Christian En- 
deavor room, where there will be a Christmas tree, 
* with all the fixin's,' as the boys say." (Shrill 
whistling from the little boys and immoderate ap- 
plause from everyone). 

[23] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

There will then be a wait of twenty-five minutes, 
while sounds of hammering and dropping may be 
heard from behind the curtains. The Boys' Club 
orchestra will render the " Poet and Peasant Over- 
ture " four times in succession, each time differently. 

At last one side of the curtains will be drawn 
back; the other will catch on something and have 
to be released by hand; someone will whisper 
loudly, " Put out the lights," following which the 
entire house will be plunged into darkness. Amid 
catcalls from the little boys, the footlights will at 
last go on, disclosing: 

The windows in the rear of the vestry rather 
ineffectively concealed by a group of small fir trees 
on standards, one of which has already fallen over, 
leaving exposed a corner of the map of Palestine 
and the list of gold-star classes for November. In 
the center of the stage is a larger tree, undecorated, 
while at the extreme left, invisible to everyone in 
the audience except those sitting at the extreme 
right, is an imitation fireplace, leaning against the 
wall. 

Twenty-five seconds too early little Flora Roches- 
ter will prance out from the wings, uttering the first 
shrill notes of a song, and will have to be grabbed 
by eager hands and pulled back. Twenty-four 
seconds later the piano will begin " The Return of 

[24] 



A CHRISTMAS SPECTACLE 

the Reindeer " with a powerful accent on the first 
note of each bar, and Flora Rochester, Lillian Mc- 
Nulty, Gertrude Hamingham and Martha Wrist will 
swirl on, dressed in white, and advance heavily into 
the footlights, which will go out. 

There will then be an interlude while Mr. Neff, 
the sexton, adjusts the connection, during which 
the four little girls stand undecided whether to 
brave it out or cry. As a compromise they giggle 
and are herded back into the wings by Mrs. Drury, 
amid applause. When the lights go on again, the 
applause becomes deafening, and as Mr. Neff walks 
triumphantly away, the little boys in the audience 
will whistle: "There she goes, there she goes, all 
dressed up in her Sunday clothes! " 

" The Return of the Reindeer " will be started 
again and the show-girls will reappear, this time 
more gingerly and somewhat dispirited. They will, 
however, sing the following, to the music of the 
" Ballet Pizzicato " from " Sylvia ": 

"We greet you, we greet you, 
On this Christmas Eve so fine. 
We greet you, we greet you. 
And wish you a good time." 

They will then turn toward the tree and Flora 
Rochester will advance, hanging a silver star on one 

[25] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

of the branches, meanwhile reciting a verse, the 
only distinguishable words of which are: "/ am 
Faith so strong and pure — '' 

At the conclusion of her recitation, the star will 
fall off. 

Lillian McNulty will then step forward and hang 
her star on a branch, reading her lines in clear 
tones: 

^' And I am Hope, a virtue great, 

My gift to Christmas now I make, 

That children and grown-ups may hope today 

That tomorrow will be a merry Christmas Day.'* 

The hanging of the third star will be consum- 
mated by Gertrude Hamingham, who will get as far 
as " Sweet Charity I bring to place upon the 
tree — " at which point the strain will become too 
great and she will forget the remainder. After 
several frantic glances toward the wings, from 
which Mrs. Drury is sending out whispered mes- 
sages to the effect that the next line begins, '* My 
message bright — " Gertrude will disappear, crying 
softly. 

After the morale of the cast has been in some 
measure restored by the pianist, who, with great 
presence of mind, plays a few bars of " Will There 
Be Any Stars In My Crown? " to cover up Ger- 

[26] 




'Round and 'round the tree I go." 



A CHRISTMAS SPECTACLE 

trude's exit, Martha Wrist will unleash a rope of 
silver tinsel from the foot of the tree, and, stringing 
it over the boughs as she skips around in a circle, 
will say, with great assurance: 

" ' Round and Wound the tree I go, 
Through the holly and the snow 
Bringing love and Christmas cheer 
Through the happy year to comeT 

At this point there will be a great commotion 
and jangling of sleigh-bells off-stage, and Mr. 
Creamer, rather poorly disguised as Santa Claus, 
will emerge from the opening in the imitation fire- 
place. A great popular demonstration for Mr. 
Creamer will follow. He will then advance to the 
footlights, and, rubbing his pillow and ducking his 
knees to denote joviality, will say thickly through 
his false beard: 

" Well, well, well, what have we here? A lot 
of bad little boys and girls who aren't going to 
get any Christmas presents this year? (Nervous 
laughter from the little boys and girls). Let me 
see, let me see ! I have a note here from Dr. Whid- 
den. Let's see what it says. (Reads from a paper 
on which there is obviously nothing written). ' If 
you and the young people of the Intermediate De- 
partment will come into the Christian Endeavor 

[27] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

room, I think we may have a little surprise for you. 
. . J Well, well, well! What do you suppose it 
can be? (Cries of "I know, I know! " from so- 
phisticated ones in the audience). Maybe it is a 
bottle of castor-oil! (Raucous jeers from the little 
boys and elaborately simulated disgust on the part 
of the little girls.) Well, anyway, suppose we go 
out and see? Now if Miss Liftnagle will oblige us 
with a little march on the piano, we will all form 
in single file — " 

At this point there will ensue a stampede toward 
the Christian Endeavor room, in which chairs will 
be broken, decorations demolished, and the protest- 
ing Mr. Creamer badly hurt. 

This will bring to a close the first part of the 
entertainment. 



[28] 



VI 

HOW TO WATCH A CHESS-MATCH 

SECOND in the list of games which it is neces- 
sary for every sportsman to know how to watch 
comes chess. If you don't know how to watch 
chess, the chances are that you will never have any 
connection with the game whatsoever. You would 
not, by any chance, be playing it yourself. 

I know some very nice people that play chess, 
mind you, and I wouldn't have thought that I was 
in any way spoofing at the game. I would sooner 
spoof at the people who engineered the Panama 
Canal or who are drawing up plans for the vehicular 
tunnel under the Hudson River. I am no man to 
make light of chess and its adherents, although they 
might very well make light of me. In fact, they 
have. 

But what I say is, that taking society by and 
large, man and boy, the chances are that chess 
would be the Farmer-Labor Party among the con- 
testants for sporting honors. 

Now, since it is settled that you probably will 
not want to play chess, unless you should be laid 

[29] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

up with a bad knee-pan or something, it follows that, 
if you want to know anything about the sport at all, 
you will have to watch it from the side-lines. That 
is what this series of lessons aims to teach you to 
do, (of course, if you are going to be nasty and 
say that you don't want even to watch it, why all 
this time has been wasted on my part as well as 
on yours). 

How To Find A Game To Watch 

The first problem confronting the chess spec- 
tator is to find some people who are playing. The 
bigger the city, the harder it is to find anyone 
indulging in chess. In a small town you can usually 
go straight to Wilbur Tatnuck's General Store, and 
be fairly sure of finding a quiet game in progress 
over behind the stove and the crate of pilot-biscuit, 
but as you draw away from the mitten district you 
find the sporting instinct of the population cropping 
out in other lines and chess becoming more and more 
restricted to the sheltered corners of Y. M. C. A. 
club-rooms and exclusive social organizations. 

However, we shall have to suppose, in order to 
get any article written at all, that you have found 
two people playing chess somewhere. They prob- 
ably will neither see nor hear you as you come up 

[30] 



HOW TO WATCH A CHESS-MATCH 

on them so you can stand directly behind the one 
who is defending the south goal without fear of 
detection. 



The Details Of The Game 

At first you may think that they are both dead, 
but a mirror held to the lips of the nearest contest- 
ant will probably show moisture (unless, of course, 
they really should be dead, which would be a hor- 
rible ending for a little lark like this. I once 
heard of a murderer who propped his two victims 
up against a chess board in sporting attitudes and 
was able to get as far as Seattle before his crime 
was discovered). 

Soon you will observe a slight twitching of an 
eye-lid or a moistening of the lips and then, like 
a greatly retarded moving-picture of a person pass- 
ing the salt, one of the players will lift a chess-man 
from one spot on the board and place it on another 
spot. 

It would be best not to stand too close to the 
board at this time as you are are likely to be tram- 
pled on in the excitement. For this action that 
you have just witnessed corresponds to a run around 
right end in a football game or a two-bagger in 
baseball, and is likely to cause considerable enthu- 

[31] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

siasm on the one hand and deep depression on the 
other. They may even forget themselves to the 
point of shifting their feet or changing the hands 
on which they are resting their foreheads. Almost 
anything is liable to happen. 

When the commotion has died down a little, it 
will be safe for you to walk around and stand be- 
hind the other player and wait there for the next 
move. While waiting it would be best to stand 
with the weight of your body evenly distributed 
between your two feet, for you will probably be 
standing there a long time and if you bear down 
on one foot all of the time, that foot is bound to 
get tired. A comfortable stance for watching chess 
is with the feet slightly apart (perhaps a foot or a 
foot and a half), with a slight bend at the knees 
to rest the legs and the weight of the body thrown 
forward on the balls of the feet. A rhythmic rising 
on the toes, holding the hands behind the back, the 
head well up and the chest out, introduces a note 
of variety into the position which will be welcome 
along about dusk. 

Not knowing anything about the game, you will 
perhaps find it difficult at first to keep your atten- 
tion on the board. This can be accomplished by 
means of several little optical tricks. For instance, 
if you look at the black and white squares on the 

[32] 



HOW TO WATCH A CHESS-MATCH 

board very hard and for a very long time, they will 
appear to jump about and change places. The 
black squares will rise from the board about a 
quarter of an inch and slightly overlap the white 
ones. Then, if you change focus suddenly, the 
white squares will do the same thing to the black 
ones. And finally, after doing this until someone 
asks you what you are looking cross-eyed for, if 
you will shut your eyes tight you will see an exact 
reproduction of the chess-board, done in pink and 
green, in your mind's eye. By this time, the play- 
ers will be almost ready for another move. 

This will make two moves that you have watched. 
It is now time to get a little fancy work into your 
game. About an hour will have already gone by 
and you should be so thoroughly grounded in the 
fundamentals of chess watching that you can pro- 
ceed to the next step. 

Have some one of your friends bring you a chair, 
a table and an old pyrography outfit, together with 
some book-ends on which to burn a design. 

Seat yourself at the table in the chair and (if I 
remember the process correctly) squeeze the bulb 
attached to the needle until the latter becomes red 
hot. Then, grasping the book-ends in the left hand, 
carefully trace around the pencilled design with 
the point of the needle. It probably will be a pic- 

[33] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

ture of the Lion of Lucerne, and you will let the 
needle slip on the way round the face, giving it the 
appearance of having shaved in a Pullman that 
morning. But that really won't make any differ- 
ence, for the whole thing is not so much to do a 
nice pair of book-ends as to help you along in 
watching the chess-match. 

If you have any scruples against burning wood, 
you may knit something, or paste stamps in an 
album. 

And before you know it, the game will be over 
and you can put on your things and go home. 



[34] 



VII 

WATCHING BASEBALL 

D. A. C. NEWS 

EIGHTEEN men play a game of baseball and 
eighteen thousand watch them, and yet those 
who play are the only ones who have any 
official direction in the matter of rules and regula- 
tions. The eighteen thousand are allowed to run 
wild. They don't have even a Spalding's Guide con- 
taining group photographs of model organizations 
of fans in Fall River, Mass., or the Junior Rooters 
of Lyons, Nebraska. Whatever course of be- 
havior a fan follows at a game he makes up for 
himself. This is, of course, ridiculous. 

The first set of official rulings for spectators at 
baseball games has been formulated and is here- 
with reproduced. It is to be hoped that in the 
general clean-up which the game is undergoing, 
the grandstand and bleachers will not resent a little 
dictation from the authorities. 

In the first place, there is the question of shouting 
encouragement, or otherwise, at the players. There 

[35] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

must be no more random screaming. It is of course 
understood that the players are entirely dependent 
on the advice offered them from the stands for their 
actions in the game, and how is a batter to know 
what to do if, for instance, he hears a little man in 
the bleachers shouting, " Wait for 'em, Wally! 
Wait for 'em," and another little man in the south 
stand shouting " Take a crack at the first one, 
Wally! " ? What would you do? What would 
Lincoln have done? 

The official advisers in the stands must work 
together. They must remember that as the batter 
advances toward the plate he is listening for them 
to give him his instructions, and if he hears con- 
flicting advice there is no telling what he may do. 
He may even have to decide for himself. 

Therefore, before each player goes to bat, there 
should be a conference among the fans who have 
ideas on what his course of action should be, and 
as soon 21s a majority have come to a decision, the 
advice should be shouted to the player in unison 
under the direction of a cheer-leader. If there are 
any dissenting opinions, they may be expressed in 
a minority report. 

In the matter of hostile remarks addressed at an 
unpopular player on the visiting team it would 
probably be better to leave the wording entirely 

[36] 



WATCHING BASEBALL 

to the individual fans. Each man has his own 
talents in this sort of thing and should be allowed 
to develop them along natural lines. In such crises 
as these in which it becomes necessary to rattle 
the opposing pitcher or prevent the visiting catcher 
from getting a difficult foul, all considerations of 
good sportsmanship should be discarded. As a 
matter of fact, it is doubtful if good sportsmanship 
should ever be allowed to interfere with the fan's 
participation in a contest. The game must be kept 
free from all softening influences. 

One of the chief duties of the fan is to engage 
in arguments with the man behind him. This 
department of the game has been allowed to run 
down fearfully. A great many men go to a ball 
game today and never speak a word to anyone 
other than the members of their own party or an 
occasional word of cheer to a player. This is 
nothing short of craven. 

An ardent supporter of the home-team should 
go to a game prepared to take offense, no matter 
what happens. He should be equipped with a stock 
of ready sallies which can be used regardless of 
what the argument is about or what has gone 
before in the exchange of words. Among the more 
popular nuggets of repartee, effective on all occa- 
sions, are the following: 

[37] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

"Oh, is that so?" 

" Eah? '^ 

" How do you get that way? " 

" Oh, is that so? " 

" So are you." 

" Aw, go have your hair bobbed." 

" Oh, is that so? " 

" Well, what are you going to do about it? " 

"Who says so? " 

" Eah? Well, I'll Cincinnati you." 

" Oh, is that so? " 

Any one of these, if hurled with sufficient venom, 
is good for ten points. And it should always be 
borne in mind that there is no danger of physical 
harm resulting from even the most ferocious-sound- 
ing argument. Statistics gathered by the War 
Department show that the percentage of actual 
blows struck in grandstand arguments is one in 
every 43,000,000. 

For those fans who are occasionally obliged to 
take inexperienced lady-friends to a game, a special 
set of rules has been drawn up. These include the 
compulsory purchase of tickets in what is called 
the " Explaining Section," a block of seats set aside 
by the management for the purpose. The view of 
the diamond from this section is not very good, but 
it doesn't matter, as the men wouldn't see anything 

[38] 



WATCHING BASEBALL 

of the game anyway and the women can see just 
enough to give them material for questions and 
to whet their curiosity. As everyone around you is 
answering questions and trying to explain score- 
keeping, there is not the embarrassment which is 
usually attendant on being overheard by unattached 
fans in the vicinity. There is also not the distract- 
ing sound of breaking pencils and modified cursing 
to interfere with unattached fans^ enjoyment of the 
game. 

Absolutely no gentlemen with uninformed ladies 
will be admitted to the main stand. In order to 
enforce this regulation, a short examination on the 
rudiments of the game will take place at the gate, 
in which ladies will be expected to answer briefly the 
following questions: (Women examiners will be in 
attendance.) 

1. What game is it that is being played on this 
field? 

2. How many games have you seen before? 

3. What is (a) a pitcher; (b) a base; (c) a bat? 

4. What color uniform does the home-team wear? 

5. What is the name of the home- team? 

6. In the following sentence, cross out the in- 
correct statements, leaving the correct one: The 
catcher stands ( i ) directly behind the pitcher in the 
pitcher's box; (2) at the gate taking tickets; (3) 

[39] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

behind the batter; (4) at the bottom of the main 
aisle, selling ginger-ale. 

7. What again is the name of the game you 
expect to see played? 

8. Do you cry easily? 

9. Is there anything else you would rather be 
doing this afternoon? 

10. If so, please go and do it. 

It has been decided that the American baseball 
fan should have a distinctive dress. A choice has 
been made from among the more popular styles and 
the following has been designated as regulation, em- 
bodying, as it does, the spirit and tone of the great 
national pastime. 

Straw hat, worn well back on the head; one cigar, 
unlighted, held between teeth; coat held across 
knees; vest worn but unbuttoned and open, dis- 
playing both a belt and suspenders, wath gold watch- 
chain connecting the bottom pockets. 

The vest may be an added expense to certain fans 
who do not wear vests during the summer months, 
but it has been decided that it is absolutely essential 
to the complete costume, and no true baseball en- 
thusiast will hesitate in complying. 



[40] 



VIII 

HOW TO BE A SPECTATOR AT 
SPRING PLANTING 

THE danger in watching gardening, as in watch- 
ing many other sports, is that you may be 
drawn into it yourself. This you must fight against. 
Your sinecure standing depends on a rigid absti- 
nence from any of the work itself. Once you stoop 
over to hold one end of a string for a groaning 
planter, once you lift one shovelful of earth or toss 
out one stone, you become a worker and a worker 
is an abomination in the eyes of the true garden 
watcher. 

A fence is, therefore, a great help. You may take 
up your position on the other side of the fence from 
the garden and lean heavily against it smoking a 
pipe, or you may even sit on it. Anything so long as 
you are out of helping distance and yet near enough 
so that the worker will be within easy range of 
your voice. You ought to be able to point a great 
deal, also. 

There is much to be watched during the early 
stages of garden-preparation. Nothing is so satis- 

[41] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

fying as to lean ruminatingly against a fence and 
observe the slow, rhythmic swing of the digger's 
back or hear the repeated scraping of the shovel- 
edge against some buried rock. It sometimes is a 
help to the digger to sing a chanty, just to give him 
the beat. And then sometimes it is not. He will 
tell you in case he doesn't need it. 

There is always a great deal for the watcher to 
do in the nature of comment on the soil. This is 
especially true if it is a new garden or has never been 
cultivated before by the present owner. The idea 
is to keep the owner from becoming too sanguine 
over the prospects. 

" That soil looks pretty clayey," is a good thing 
to say. (It is hard to say, clearly, too. You had 
better practise it before trying it out on the 
gardener). 

"I don't think that you'll have much luck with 
potatoes in that kind of earth," is another helpful 
approach. It is even better to go at it the other way, 
finding out first what the owner expects to plant. 
It may be that he isn't going to plant any potatoes, 
and then there you are, stuck with a perfectly dandy 
prediction which has no bearing on the case. It is 
time enough to pull it after he has told you that 
he expects to plant peas, beans, beets, corn. Then 
you can interrupt him and say: " Corn? " incredu- 

[42] 



WATCHING A SPRING PLANTING 

lously. " You don't expect to get any corn in that 
soil do you? Don't you know that corn requires 
a large percentage of bi-carbonate of soda in the soil, 
and I don't think, from the looks, that there is an 
ounce of soda bi-carb. in your whole plot. Even 
if the corn does come up, it will be so tough you can't 
eat it." 

Then you can laugh, and call out to a neighbor, 
or even to the man's wife: " Hey, what do you 
know? Steve here thinks he's going to get some 
com up in this soil! " 

The watcher will find plenty to do when the time 
comes to pick the stones out of the freshly turned- 
over earth. It is his work to get upon a high place 
where he can survey the whole garden and detect 
the more obvious rocks. 

" Here is a big fella over here, Steve," he may say. 
Or: " Just run your rake a little over in that corner. 
I'll bet you'll find a nest of them there." 

" Plymouth Rock " is a funny thing to call any 
particularly offensive boulder, and is sure to get 
a laugh, especially if you kid the digger good- 
naturedly about being a Pilgrim and landing on it. 
He may even give it to you to keep. 

Just as a matter of convenience for the worker, 
watchers have sometimes gone to the trouble of 
keeping count of the number of stones thrown out. 

[43] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

This is done by shouting out the count after each 
stone has been tossed. It makes a sort of game of 
the thing, and in this spirit the digger may be urged 
on to make a record. 

"That's forty-eight, old man! Come on now, 
make her fifty. Attaboy, forty-nine! Only one 
more to go. We-want-fifty-we-want-fifty-we-want 
fifty.'' 

And not only stones will be found, but queer 
objects which have got themselves buried in the 
ground during the winter-months and have become 
metamorphosed, so they are half way between one 
thing and another. As the digger holds one of 
these objets dirt gingerly between his thumb and 
forefinger the watcher has plenty of opportunity to 
shout out: 

" You'd better save that. It may come in handy 
someday. What is it, Eddie? Your old beard? " 

And funny cracks like that. 

Here is where it is going to be difficult to keep 
to your resolution about not helping. After the 
digging, and stoning, and turning-over has been 
done, and the ground is all nice and soft and loamy, 
the idea of running a rake softly over the susceptible 
surface and leaving a beautiful even design in its 
wake, is almost too tempting to be withstood. 

The worker himself will do all that he can to 

[44] 




'Atta boy, forty-nine: Only one more to go!" 



WATCHING A SPRING PLANTING 

make it hard for you. He will rake with evident 
delight, much longer than is necessary, back and 
forth, across and back, cocking his head and sur- 
veying the pattern and fixing it up along the edges 
with a care which is nothing short of insulting con- 
sidering the fact that the whole thing has got to be 
mussed up again when the planting begins. 

If you feel that you can no longer stand it without 
offering to assist, get down from the fence and go 
into your own house and up to your own room. 
There pray for strength. By the time you come 
down, the owner of the garden ought to have stopped 
raking and got started on the planting. 

Here the watcher's task is almost entirely ad- 
visory. And, for the first part of the planting, he 
should lie low and say nothing. Wait until the 
planter has got his rows marked out and has wob- 
bled along on his knees pressing the seeds into per- 
haps half the length of his first row. Then say: 

" Hey there, Charlie! YouVe got those rows 
going the wrong way." 

Charlie will say no he hasn't. Then he will ask 
what you mean the wrong way. 

" Why, you poor cod, you've got them running 
north and south. They ought to go east and west. 
The sun rises over there, doesn't it? " (Charlie 
will attempt to deny this, but you must go right on.) 

t4S] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

"And it comes on up behind that tree and over my 
roof and sets over there, doesn't it? " (By this 
time, Charlie will be crying with rage.) " Well, 
just as soon as your beans get up an inch or two 
they are going to cast a shadow right down the 
whole row and only those in front will ever get any 
sun. You can't grow things without sun, you 
know." 

If Charlie takes you seriously and starts in to 
rearrange his rows in the other direction, you might 
perhaps get down off the fence and go in the house. 
You have done enough. If he doesn't take you 
seriously, you surely had better go in. 



[46] 



IX 
THE MANHATTADOR 

ANNOUNCEMENTS have been made of a 
bull-fight to be held in Madison Square 
Garden, New York, in which onlj^ the more humane 
features of the Spanish institution are to be re- 
tained. The bull will not be killed, or even hurt, 
and horses will not be used as bait. 

If a bull-fight must be held, this is of course the 
way to hold it, but what features are to be sub- 
stituted for the playful gorings and stabbings of 
the Madrid system? Something must be done to 
enrage the bull, otherwise he will just sulk in a 
corner or walk out on the whole affair. Following 
is a suggestion for the program of events: 

1. Grand parade around the ring, headed by a 
brass-band and the mayor in matador's costume. 
Invitations to march in this parade will be issued 
to every one in the bull-fighting set with the excep- 
tion of the bull, who will be ignored. This will 
make him pretty sore to start with. 

2. After the marchers have been seated, the bull 
will be led into the ring. An organized cheering 

[47] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

section among the spectators will immediately start 
jeering him, whistling, and calling " Take off those 
horns, we know you! " 

3. The picadors will now enter, bearing pikes 
with ticklers on the ends. These will be brushed 
across the bull's nose as the picadors rush past 
him on noisy motor-cycles. The noise of the motor- 
cycles is counted on to irritate the bull quite as much 
as the ticklers, as he will probably be trying to 
sleep at the time. 

4. Enter the bandilleros, carrying various ornate 
articles of girls' clothing (daisy-hat with blue rib- 
bons, pink sash, lace jabot, etc.) which will, one by 
one, be hung on the bull when he isn't looking. In 
order to accomplish this, one of the bandilleros will 
engage the animal in conversation while another 
sneaks up behind him with the frippery. When he 
is quite trimmed, the bandilleros will withdraw to 
behind a shelter and call him: " Lizzie! " 

5. By this time, the bull will be almost crying 
he will be so sore. This is the moment for the en- 
trance of the intrepid matador. The matador will 
wear an outing cap with a cutaway and Jaeger 
vest, and the animal will become so infuriated by 
this inexcusable mesalliance of garments that he will 
charge madly at his antagonist. The matador, who 
will be equipped with boxing-gloves, will feint with 

[48] 



THE MANHATTADOR 

his left and pull the daisy-hat down over the bull's 
eyes with his right, immediately afterward stepping 
quickly to one side. The bull, blinded by the 
daisies, will not know where to go next and soon will 
laughingly admit that the joke has been on him. 
He will then allow the matador to jump on his back 
and ride around the ring, making good-natured at- 
tempts to unseat his rider. 



[49] 



WHAT TO DO WHILE THE FAMILY IS 

AWAY 

SOMEWHERE or other the legend has sprung 
up that, as soon as the family goes away for 
the summer, Daddy brushes the hair over his bald 
spot, ties up his shoes, and goes out on a whirlwind 
trip through the hellish districts of town. The 
funny papers are responsible for this, just as they 
are responsible for the idea that all millionaires 
are fat and that Negroes are inordinately fond of 
watermelons. 

I will not deny that for just about four minutes 
after the train has left, bearing Mother, Sister, 
Junior, Ingabog and the mechanical walrus on their 
way to Anybunkport, Daddy is suffused with a 
certain queer feeling of being eleven years old and 
down-town alone for the first time with fifteen cents 
to spend on anything he wants. The city seems to 
spread itself out before him just ablaze with lights 
and his feet rise lightly from the ground as if at- 
tached to toy balloons. I do not deny that his first 
move is to straighten his tie. 

[50] 



WHEN THE FAMILY IS AWAY 

But five minutes would be a generous allowance 
for the duration of this foot-loose elation. As he 
leaves the station he suddenly becomes aware of the 
fact that no one else has heard about his being 
fancy-free. Everyone seems to be going some- 
where in a very important manner. A great many 
people, oddly enough seem to be going home. 
Ordinarily he would be going home, too. But 
there would not be much sense in going home now, 

without . But come, come, this is no way to 

feel! Buck up, man! How about a wild oat or 
two? 

Around at the club the doorman says that Mr. 
McNartly hasn't been in all afternoon and that 
Mr. Freem was in at about four-thirty but went out 
again with a bag. There is no one in the lounge 
whom he ever saw before. A lot of new members 
must have been taken in at the last meeting. The 
club is running dowTi fast. He calls up Eddie Mas- 
tayer's office but he has gone for the day. Oh, 
well, someone will probably come in for dinner. 
He hasn't eaten dinner at the club for a long time 
and there will be just time for a swim before settling 
down to a nice piece of salmon steak. 

All the new members seem to be congregated now 
in the pool and they look him over as if he were a 
fresh-air child being given a day's outing. He be- 

[SI] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

comes self-conscious and slips on the marble floor, 
falling and hurting his shin quite badly. Who the 
hell are these people anyway? And where is the 
old bunch? He emerges from the locker room 
much hotter than he was before and in addition, 
boiling with rage. 

Dinner is one of the most depressing rituals he 
has ever gone through with. Even the v/aiters seem 
unfamiliar. Once he even gets up and goes out 
to the front of the building to see if he hasn't got 
into the wrong club-house by mistake. Pretty soon 
a terrible person whose name is either Riegle 
or Ropple comes and sits down with him, offering 
as his share of the conversation the dogmatic an- 
nouncement that it has been hotter today than it 
was yesterday. This is denied with some feeling, 
although it is known to be true. Dessert is dis- 
pensed with for the sake of getting away from 
Riegle or Ropple or whatever his name is. 

Then the first gay evening looms up ahead. 
What to do? There is nothing to prevent his 
drawing all the money out of the bank and tearing 
the town wide open from the City Hall to the Sol- 
dier's Monument. There is nothing to prevent his 
formally introducing himself to some nice blonde 
and watching her get the meat out of a lobster-claw. 
There is nothing to prevent his hiring some boot- 

[S2] 



WHEN THE FAMILY IS AWAY 

legger to anoint him with synthetic gin until he 
glows like a fire-fly and imagines that he has just 
been elected Mayor on a Free Ice-Cream ticket. 
Absolutely nothing stands in his way, except a dis- 
pairing vision of crepe letters before his eyes read- 
ing: '' — And For What?" 

He ends up by going to the movies where he falls 
asleep. Rather than go home to the empty house 
he stays at the club. In the morning he is at the 
office at a quarter to seven. 

Now there ought to be several things that a man 
could do at home to relieve the tedium of his exist- 
ence while the family is away. Once you get 
accustomed to the sound of your footsteps on the 
floors and reach a state of self-control where you 
don't break down and sob every time you run into 
a toy which has been left standing around, there are 
lots of ways of keeping yourself amused in an 
empty house. 

You can set the victrola going and dance. You 
may never have had an opportunity to get off by 
yourself and practice those new steps without some- 
one's coming suddenly into the room and making 
you look foolish. (That's one big advantage about 
being absolutely alone in a house. You can't look 
foolish, no matter what you do. You may be 
foolish, but no one except you and your God knows 

[53] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

about it and God probably has a great deal too 
much to do to go around telling people how foolish 
you were). So roll back the rugs and put on 
" Kalua " and, holding out one arm in as fancy a 
manner as you wish, slip the other daintily about 
the waist of an imaginary partner and step out. 
You'd be surprised to see how graceful you are. 
Pretty soon you will get confidence to try a few 
tricks. A very nice one is to stop in the middle 
of a step, point the left toe delicately twice in time 
to the music, dip, and whirl. It makes no difference 
if you fall on the whirl. Who cares? And when 
you are through dancing you can go out to the 
faucet and get yourself a drink — provided the 
water hasn't been turned off. 

Lots of fun may also be had by going out into the 
kitchen and making things with whatever is left 
in the pantry. There will probably be plenty of 
salt and nutmegs, with boxes of cooking soda, 
tapioca, corn-starch and maybe, if you are lucky, 
an old bottle of olives. Get out a cook-book and 
choose something that looks nice in the picture. In 
place of the ingredients which you do not have, 
substitute those which you do, thus: nutmegs for 
eggs, tapioca for truffles, corn-starch and water for 
milk, and so forth and so forth. Then go in and 
set the table according to the instructions in the 

[54] 



WHEN THE FAMILY IS AWAY 

cook-book for a Washington's Birthday party, light 
the candles, and with one of them set fire to the 
house. 

There is probably a night-train for Anybunkport 
which you can catch while the place is still burning. 

To those male readers whose families are away 
for the summer: 

Tear the above story out along dotted line and 
mail it to the folks, writing in pencil across the top 
" This guy has struck it about right.'' Then drop 
around tonight at seven-thirty to Eddie's apart- 
ment, Joe Reddish, John Liftwich, Harry Thibault 
and three others will be there and the limit will be 
fifty cents. Game will absolutely break up at one- 
thirty. No fooling. One-thirty and not a minute 
longer. 



[55I 



XI 

" ROLL YOUR OWN " 

Inside Points on Building and Maintaining a 
Private Tennis Court 

NOW that the Great War is practically over, 
until the next one begins there isn't very 
much that you can do with that large plot of 
ground which used to be your war-garden. It is 
too small for a running-track and too large for 
nasturtiums. Obviously, the only thing left is a 
tennis-court. 

One really ought to have a tennis-court of one's 
own. Those at the Club are always so full that on 
Saturdays and Sundays the people v/aiting to play 
look like the gallery at a Davis Cup match, and 
even when you do get located you have two sets of 
balls to chase, yours and those of the people in the 
next court. 

The first thing is to decide among yourselves just 
what kind of court it is to be. There are three 
kinds: grass, clay, and corn-meal. In Maine, 
gravel courts are also very popular. Father will 
usually hold out for a grass court because it gives 

[56] 



'' ROLL YOUR OWN " 

a slower bounce to the ball and Father isn't so quick 
on the bounce as he used to be. All Mother insists 
on is plenty of headroom. Junior and Myrtis will 
want a clay one because you can dance on a clay 
one in the evening. The court as finished will be 
a combination grass and dirt, with a little golden- 
rod late in August. 

A little study will be necessary before laying out 
the court. I mean you can't just go out and mark 
a court by guess-work. You must first learn what 
the dimensions are supposed to be and get as near 
to them as is humanly possible. Whereas there 
might be a slight margin for error in some measure- 
ments, it is absolutely essential that both sides are 
the same length, otherwise you might end up by 
lobbing back to yourself if you got very excited. 

The worst place to get the dope on how to 
arrange a tennis-court is in the Encyclopaedia Bri- 
tannica. The article on tennis was evidently 
written by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It be- 
gins by explaining that in America tennis is called 
" court tennis." The only answer to that is, 
" You're a cock-eyed liar! " The whole article is 
like this. 

The name " tennis," it says, probably comes from 
the French " Tenez! " meaning " Take it! Play! " 
More likely, in my opinion, it is derived from the 

[57] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Polish " Tinith! " meaning '' Go on, that was not 
outside! " 

During the Fourteenth Century the game was 
played by the highest people in France. Louis X 
died from a chill contracted after playing. Charles 
V was devoted to it, although he tried in vain to 
stop it as a pastime for the lower classes (the 
origin of the country-club) ; Charles VI watched it 
being played from the room where he was confined 
during his attack of insanity and Du Guesclin 
amused himself with it during the siege of Dinan. 
And, although it doesn't say so in the Encyclopaedia, 
Robert C. Benchley, after playing for the first time 
in the season of 1922, was so lame under the right 
shoulder-blade that he couldn't lift a glass to his 
mouth. 

This fascinating historical survey of tennis goes 
on to say that in the reign of Henri IV the game 
was so popular that it was said that " there were 
more tennis-players in Paris than drunkards in 
England." The drunkards of England were so 
upset by this boast that they immediately started 
a drive for membership with the slogan, " Five 
thousand more drunkards by April 15, and to Hell 
with France! " One thing led to another until war 
was declared. 

The net does not appear until the 17 th century. 

[58] 



" ROLL YOUR OWN " 

Up until that time a rope, either fringed or tasseled, 
was stretched across the court. This probably had 
to be abandoned because it was so easy to crawl 
under it and chase your opponent. There might 
also have been ample opportunity for the person 
playing at the net or at the " rope," to catch the eye 
of the player directly opposite by waving his rac- 
quet high in the air and then to kick him under the 
rope, knocking him for a loop while the ball was 
being put into play in his territory. You have to 
watch these Frenchmen every minute. 

The Encyclopaedia Britannica gives fifteen lines 
to " Tennis in America." It says that " few tennis 
courts existed in America before 1880, but that now 
there are courts in Boston, New York, Chicago, 
Tuxedo and Lakewood and several other places." 
Everyone try hard to think now just where those 
other places are! 

Which reminds us that one of them is going to 
be in your side yard where the garden used to be. 
After you have got the dimensions from the Ency- 
clopaedia, call up a professional tennis-court maker 
and get him to do the job for you. Just tell him 
that you want " a tennis-court." 

Once it is built the fun begins. According to the 
arrangement, each member of the family is to have 
certain hours during which it belongs to them and 

[59] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

no one else. Thus the children can play before 
breakfast and after breakfast until the sun gets 
around so that the west court is shady. Then 
Daddy and Mother and sprightly friends may take 
it over. Later in the afternoon the children have it 
again, and if there is any light left after dinner 
Daddy can take a whirl at the ball. 

What actually will happen is this: Right after 
breakfast Roger Beeman, who lives across the street 
and who is home for the summer with a couple of 
college friends who are just dandy looking, will 
come over and ask if they may use the court until 
someone wants it. They will let Myrtis play with 
them and perhaps Myrtis' girl-chum from West- 
over. They will play five sets, running into scores 
like 19-17, and at lunch time will make plans for a 
ride into the country for the afternoon. Daddy will 
stick around in the offing all dressed up in his 
tennis-clothes waiting to play with Uncle Ted, but 
somehow or other every time he approaches the 
court the young people will be in the middle of a set. 

After lunch, Lillian Nieman, who lives three 
houses down the street, will come up and ask if she 
may bring her cousin (just on from the West) to 
play a set until someone wants the court. Lillian's 
cousin has never played tennis before but she has 
done a lot of croquet and thinks she ought to pick 

[60] 




For three hours there is a great deal of screaming. 



" ROLL YOUR OWN " 

tennis up rather easily. For three hours there is a 
great deal of screaming, with Lillian and her cousin 
hitting the ball an aggregate of eleven times, while 
Daddy j>atters up and down the side-lines, all 
dressed up in white, practising shots against the 
netting. 

Finally, the girls will ask him to play with them, 
and he will thank them and say that he has to go 
in the house now as he is all perspiration and is 
afraid of catching cold. 

After dinner there is dancing on the court by the 
young people. Anyway, Daddy is getting pretty 
old for tennis. 



[6i] 



XII 
DO INSECTS THINK? 

IN a recent book entitled, ^' The Psychic Life of 
Insects," Professor Bouvier says that we must 
be careful not to credit the little winged fellows with 
intelligence when they behave in what seems like an 
intelligent manner. They may be only reacting. 
I would like to confront the Professor with an in- 
stance of reasoning power on the part of an insect 
which can not be explained away in any such 
manner. 

During the summer of 1899, while I was at work 
on my treatise '' Do Larvae Laugh/' we kept a 
female wasp at our cottage in the Adirondacks. It 
really was more like a child of our own than a wasp, 
except that it looked more like a wasp than a child 
of our own. That was one of the ways we told the 
difference. 

It was still a young wasp when we got it (thirteen 
or fourteen years old) and for some time we could 
not get it to eat or drink, it was so shy. Since it 
was a female, we decided to call it Miriam, but soon 
the children's nickname for it — ^' Pudge " — be- 

[62] 



DO INSECTS THINK? 

came a fixture, and " Pudge " it was from that time 
on. 

One evening I had been working late in my 
laboratory fooling round with some gin and other 
chemicals, and in leaving the room I tripped over 
a nine of diamonds which someone had left lying 
on the floor and knocked over my card catalogue 
containing the names and addresses of all the larvae 
worth knowing in North America. The cards went 
everywhere. 

I was too tired to stop to pick them up that night, 
and went sobbing to bed, just as mad as I could be. 
As I went, however, I noticed the wasp flying about 
in circles over the scattered cards. " Maybe Pudge 
will pick them up," I said half-laughingly to my- 
self, never thinking for one moment that such would 
be the case. 

When I came down the next morning Pudge was 
still asleep over in her box, evidently tired out. 
And well she might have been. For there on the 
floor lay the cards scattered all about just as I 
had left them the night before. The faithful little 
insect had buzzed about all night trying to come to 
some decision about picking them up and arranging 
them in the catalogue-box, and then, figuring out 
for herself that, as she knew practically nothing 
about larvae of any sort except wasp-larvae, she 

[63] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

would probably make more of a mess of rearrang- 
ing them than as if she left them on the floor for 
me to fix. It was just too much for her to tackle, 
and, discouraged, she went over and lay down in 
her box, where she cried herself to sleep. 

If this is not an answer to Professor Bouvier's 
statement that insects have no reasoning power, I 
do not know what is. 



[64] 



XIII 
THE SCORE IN THE STANDS 

THE opening week of the baseball season 
brought out few surprises. The line-up in 
the grandstands was practically the same as when 
the season closed last Fall, most of the fans busying 
themselves before the first game started by picking 
old 192 1 seat checks and October peanut crumbs 
out of the pockets of their light-weight overcoats. 

Old-timers on the two teams recognized the famil- 
iar faces in the bleachers and were quick to give 
them a welcoming cheer. The game by innings as 
it was conducted by the spectators is as follows: 

FIRST INNING: Scanlon, sitting in the first- 
base bleachers, yelled to Ruth to lead off with a 
homer. Thibbets sharpened his pencil. Liebman 
and O'Rourke, in the south stand, engaged in a bit- 
ter controversy over Feckingpaugh's last-season bat- 
ting average. NO RUNS. 

SECOND INNING: Scanlon yelled to Bodie to 
to whang out a double. Turtelot said that Bodie 
couldn't do it. Scanlon said " Oh, is that so? " 
Turtelot said " Yes, that's so and whad' yer know 

[6s] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

about that? " Bodie whanged out a double and 
Scanlon's collar came undone and he lost his 
derby. Stevens announced that this made Bodie's 
batting average looo for the season so far. Joslin 
laughed. 

THIRD INNING: Thibbets sharpened his pen- 
cil. Zinnzer yelled to Mays to watch out for a fast 
one. Steinway yelled to Mays to watch out for a 
slow one. Mays fanned. O'Rourke called out and 
asked Brazill how all the little brazil-nuts were. 
Levy turned to O'Rourke and said he'd brazil-nut 
him. O'Rourke said '' Eah? When do you start 
doing it? " Levy said: " Right now." O'Rourke 
said: "All right, come on. I'm waiting." Levy 
said: " Eah? " O'Rourke said: " Well, why don't 
you come, you big haddock? " Levy said he'd wait 
for O'Rourke outside where there weren't any la- 
dies. NO RUNS. 

FOURTH INNING: Scanlon called out to Ruth 
to knock a homer. Thibbets sharpened his pencil. 
Scanlon yelled : " Atta-boy, Babe, whad' I tell 
yer! " when Ruth got a single. 

FIFTH INNING: Mrs. Whitebait asked Mr. 
Whitebait how you marked a home-run on the 
score-card. Mr. Whitebait said: "Why do you 
have to know? No one has knocked a home-run." 
Mrs. Whitebait said that Babe Ruth ran home in 

[66] 



THE SCORE IN THE STANDS 

the last inning. " Yes, I know," said Mr. White- 
bait, " but it wasn't a home-run." Mrs. W. asked 
him with some asperity just why it wasn't a home- 
run, if a man ran home, especially if it was Babe 
Ruth. Mr. W. said: "I'll tell you later. I want 
to watch the game." Mrs. Whitebait began to cry 
a little. Mr. Whitebait groaned and snatched the 
card away from her and marked a home-run for 
Ruth in the fourth inning. 

SIXTH INNING: Thurston called out to Hasty 
not to let them fool him. Wicker said that where 
Hasty got fooled in the first place was when he let 
them tell him he could play baseball. Unknown 
man said that he was " too Hasty," and laughed 
very hard. Thurston said that Hasty was a better 
pitcher than Mays, when he was in form. Un- 
known man said " Eah? " and laughed very hard 
again. Wicker asked how many times in seven years 
Hasty was in form and Thurston replied : " Often 
enough for you." Unknown man said that what 
Hasty needed was some hasty-pudding, and laughed 
so hard that his friend had to take him out. 

Thibbets sharpened his pencil. 

SEVENTH INNING: Libby called "Every- 
body up! " as if he had just originated the idea, 
and seemed proudly pleased when everyone stood 
up. Taussig threw money to the boy for a bag of 

[67] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

peanuts who tossed the bag to Levy who kept it. 
Taussig to boy to Levy. 

Scanlon yelled to Ruth to come through with a 
homer. Ruth knocked a single and Scanlon yelled 
" Atta-boy, Babe! All-er way 'round! All-er way 
round, Babe! " Mrs. Whitebait asked Mr. White- 
bait which were the Clevelands. Mr. Whitebait said 
very quietly that the Clevelands weren't playing to- 
day, just New York and Philadelphia and that only 
two teams could play the game at the same time, that 
perhaps next year they would have it so that Cleve- 
land and Philadelphia could both play New York at 
once but the rules would have to be changed first. 
Mrs. Whitebait said that he didn't have to be so 
nasty about is. Mr. W. said My God, who's being 
nasty? Mrs. W. said that the only reason she came 
up with him anyway to see the Giants play was be- 
cause then she knew that he wasn't off with a lot of 
bootleggers. Mr. W. said that it wasn't the Giants 
but the Yankees that she was watching and where 
did she get that bootlegger stuff. Mrs. W. said never 
mind where she got it. NO RUNS. 

EIGHTH INNING: Thibbets sharpened his 
pencil. Litner got up and went home. Scanlon 
yelled to Ruth to end up the game with a homer. 
Ruth singled. Scanlon yelled '' Atta-Babe! " and 
went home. 

[68] 



THE SCORE IN THE STANDS 

NINTH INNING: Stevens began figuring up 
the players' batting averages for the season thus far. 
Wicker called over to Thurston and asked him how 
Mr. Hasty was now. Thurston said " That's all 
right how he is." Mrs. Whitebait said that she in- 
tended to go to her sister's for dinner and that Mr. 
Whitebait could do as he liked. Mr. Whitebait 
told her to bet that he would do just that. Thibbets 
broke his pencil. 

Score: New York ii. Philadelphia i 



[69] 



XIV 
MID-WINTER SPORTS 

THESE are melancholy days for the news- 
paper sporting-writers. The complaints are 
all in from old grads of Miami who feel that there 
weren't enough Miami men on the All-American 
football team, and it is too early to begin writing 
about the baseball training camps. Once in a while 
some lady swimmer goes around a tank three hun- 
dred times, or the holder of the Class B squash 
championship " meets all-comers in court tilt/' but 
aside from that, the sporting world is buried with 
the nuts for the winter. 

Since sporting-writers must live, why not intro- 
duce a few items of general interest into their col- 
umns, accounts of the numerous contests of speed 
and endurance which take place during the winter 
months in the homes of our citizenry? For in- 
stance: 

The nightly races between Mr. and Mrs. Theodore 
M. Twamly, to see who can get into bed first, leav- 
ing the opening of the windows and putting out of 
the light for the loser, was won last night for the 

[70] 



MID-WINTER SPORTS 

first time this winter by Mr. Twamly. Strategy 
entered largely into the victory, Mr. Twamly getting 
into bed with most of his clothes on. 

An interesting exhibition of endurance was given 
by Martin W. Lasbert at his home last evening 
when he covered the distance between the cold-water 
tap in his bath-room to the bedside of his young 
daughter, Mertice, eighteen times in three hours, 
this being the number of her demands for water 
to drink. When interviewed after the eighteenth 
Jap, Mr. Lasbert said: "I wouldn't do it another 
time, not if the child were parching." Shortly after 
that he made his nineteenth trip. 

As was exclusively predicted in these columns 
yesterday and in accordance with all the dope, 
Chester H. Flerlie suffered his sixtieth consecutive 
defeat last evening at the hands of the American 
Radiator Company, the builders of his furnace. 
With all respect for Mr. Flerlie's pluck in attempt- 
ing, night after night, to dislodge clinkers caught 
in the grate, it must be admitted, even by his host 
of friends, that he might much better be engaged 
in some gainful occupation. The grate tackled by 
the doughty challenger last night was one of the 
fine- tooth comb variety (the " Non-Sifto " No. 

[71] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

1 14863), in which the clinker is caught by a patent 
clutch and held securely until the wrecking-crew 
arrives. At the end of the bout Mr. Fierlie was 
led away to his dressing room, suffering from 
lacerated hands and internal injuries. '' I'm 
through/' was his only comment. 

This morning's winners in the Lymedale com- 
muters' contest for seats on the shady side of the 
car on the 8:28 were L. Y. Irman, Sydney M. Gis- 
sith, John F. Nothman and Louis Leque. All the 
other seats were won by commuters from Loose 
Valley, the next station above Lymedale. In trying 
to scramble up the car-steps in advance of lady 
passengers, Merton Steef had his right shin badly 
skinned and hit his jaw on the bottom step. Time 
was not called while his injuries were being looked 
after. 

Before an enthusiastic and notable gathering, 
young Lester J. Dimmik, age three, put to rout his 
younger brother, Carl Withney Dimmik, Jr., age 
two, in their matutinal contest to see which can dis- 
pose of his Wheatena first. In the early stages of 
the match, it began to look as if the bantamweight 
would win in a walk, owing to his trick of throwing 
spoonfuls of the breakfast food over his shoulder 

[72] 




He was further aided by the breaks of the game. 



MID-WINTER SPORTS 

and under the tray of his high-chair. The referees 
soon put a stop to this, however, and specified that 
the Wheatena must be placed in the mouth. This 
cramped Dimmick Junior's form and it soon be- 
came impossible for him to locate his mouth at all. 
At this point, young Lester took the lead, which he 
maintained until he crossed the line an easy winner. 
As a reward he was relieved of the necessity of 
eating another dish of Wheatena. 

Stephen L. Agnew was the lucky guest in the 
home of Orrin F. McNeal this week-end, beating 
out Lee Stable for first chance at the bath-tub on 
Sunday morning. Both contestants came out of 
their bed rooms at the same time, but Agnew's room 
being nearer the bath-room, he made the distance 
down the hall in two seconds quicker time than his 
somewhat heavier opponent, and was further aided 
by the breaks of the game when Stable dropped his 
sponge half-way down the straightaway. Agnew's 
time in the bath-room was i hr. and 25 minutes. 



[73] 



XV 

READING THE FUNNIES ALOUD 

ONE of the minor enjoyable features of having 
children is the necessity of reading aloud to 
them the colored comic sections in the Sunday 
papers. 

And no matter how good your intentions may 
have been at first to keep the things out of the house 
(the comic sections, not the children) sooner or 
later there comes a Sunday when you find that your 
little boy has, in some underground fashion, learned 
of the raucous existence of Simon Simp or the 
Breakback Babies, and is demanding the current 
installment with a fervor which will not be denied. 

Sunday morning in our house has now become a 
time for low subterfuge on the part of Doris and 
me in our attempts to be somewhere else when 
Junior appears dragging the " funnies '' (a loath- 
some term in itself) to be read to him. I make 
believe that the furnace looks as if it might fall 
apart at any minute if it is not watched closely, and 
Doris calls from upstairs that she may be some time 
over the weekly accounts. 

[74] 



READING THE FUNNIES ALOUD 

But sooner or later Junior ferrets one of us out 
and presents himself beaming. " Now will you 
read me the ' funnies ' ? " is the dread sentence 
which opens the siege. It then becomes a rather ill- 
natured contest between Doris and me to see which 
can pick the more bearable pages to read, leaving 
the interminable ones, containing great balloons 
pregnant with words, for the other. 

I usually find that Doris has read the Briggs page 
to Junior before I get downstairs, the Briggs page 
(and possibly the drawings of Voight's Lester De 
Pester) being the only department that an adult 
mind can dwell on and keep its self-respect. '' Now 
/ will read you Briggs," says Doris with the air of 
an indulgent parent, but settling down with great 
relish to the task, " and Daddy will read you the 
others." 

Having been stuck for over a year with " the 
others " I have now reached a stage where I utilize 
a sort of second sight in the reading whereby the 
words are seen and pronounced without ever regis- 
tering on my brain at all. And, as I sit with Junior 
impassive on my lap (just why children should so 
frantically seek to have the " funnies " read to 
them is a mystery, for they never by any chance 
seem to derive the slightest emotional pleasure from 
the recital but sit in stony silence as if they rather 

[75] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

disapproved of the whole thing after all) I have 
evolved a system which enables me to carry on a 
little constructive thinking while reading aloud, 
thereby keeping the time from being entirely 
wasted. Heaven knows we get little enough oppor- 
tunity to sit down and think things out in this busy 
work-a-day world, so that this little period of mental 
freedom is in the nature of a godsend. Thus: 



What Is Being Read Aloud 

" Here he says ' Gee but this 
is tough luck a new automo- 
bile an' no place to go ' and 
the dog is saying ' It aint so 
tough at that ' Then here in 
the next picture the old man 
says ' Percy ain't in my class 
as a chauffeur, he ain't as fear- 
less as me ' and this one is 
saying ' Hello there, that looks 
like the old tin Lizzie that I 
gave to the General last year 
I guess I'll take a peek and see 
what's up ' * Well what are 
you doing hanging around 
here, what do you think this is 
a hotel?' 'Say where do you 
get that stuff you ain't no 
justice of the peace you know ' 
' Wow ! Let me out let me 
out, I say ' ' I'll show you 
biff biff wham zowie ! ' etc. 
etc. " 



Concurrent Thinking 

" Here I am in the thirties 
and it is high time that I made 
something of myself. Is my 
job as good as I deserve? By 
studying nights I might fit 
myself for a better position in 
the foreign exchange depart- 
ment, but that would mean an 
outlay of money. Further- 
more, is it, on the whole, wise 
to attempt to hurry the work- 
ings of Fate? Is not perhaps 
the determinist right who says 
that what we are and what we 
ever can be is already written 
in the books, that we can not 
alter the workings of Destiny 
one iota? This theory is, of 
course, tenable, but, on the 
whole, it seems to me that if I 
were to take the matter into 
my own hands, etc. etc." 



And then, when the last pot of boiling water has 
been upset over the last grandfather's back, and 
Junior has slid down from your lap as near satis- 

[76] 



READING THE FUNNIES ALOUD 

fied as he ever will be, you have ten or fifteen min- 
utes of constructive thinking behind you, which, if 
practiced every Sunday, will make you President 
of the company within a few years. 



[77] 



XVI 
OPERA SYNOPSES 

Some Sample Outlines of Grand Opera Plots For 

Home Study, 

I 

DIE MEISTER-GENOSSENSCHAFT 

Scene: The Forests of Germany. 
Time: Antiquity. 

Cast 

Strudel, God of Rain Basso 

ScHMALZ, God of Slight Drizzle Tenor 

Immergluck, Goddess of the Six Primary 

Colors Soprano 

LuDwiG DAS EiWEiss, the Knight of the Iron 

Duck Baritone 

The Woodpecker Soprano 

Argument 
The basis of " Die Meister-Genossenschaft " is 
an old legend of Germany which tells how the 
Whale got his Stomach. 

[78] 



OPERA SYNOPSES 

Act I 

The Rhine at Low Tide Just Below Weld- 
schnoffen. — Immergllick has grown weary of always 
sitting on the same rock with the same fishes swim- 
ming by every day, and sends for SchwUl to suggest 
something to do. Schwlil asks her how she would 
like to have pass before her all the wonders of 
the world fashioned by the hand of man. She says, 
rotten. He then suggests that Ringblattz, son of 
Pflucht, be made to appear before her and fight a 
mortal combat with the Iron Duck. This pleases 
ImmerglUck and she summons to her the four 
dwarfs: Hot Water, Cold Water, Cool, and Cloudy. 
She bids them bring Ringblattz to her. They re- 
fuse, because Pfiucht has at one time rescued them 
from being buried alive by acorns, and, in a rage, 
ImmerglUck strikes them all dead with a thunder- 
bolt. 

Act 2 

A Mountain Pass. — Repenting of her deed, 
ImmerglUck has sought advice of the giants, Offen 
and Besitz, and they tell her that she must procure 
the magic zither which confers upon its owner the 
power to go to sleep while apparently carrying on 
a conversation. This magic zither has been hidden 
for three hundred centuries in an old bureau drawer, 

[79] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

guarded by the Iron Duck, and, although many 
have attempted to rescue it, all have died of a 
strange ailment just as success was within their 
grasp. 

But Immergliick calls to her side Dampfboot, the 
tinsmith of the gods, and bids him make for her 
a tarnhelm or invisible cap which will enable her 
to talk to people without their understanding a word 
she says. For a dollar and a half extra Dampfboot 
throws in a magic ring which renders its wearer 
insensible. Thus armed, Immergliick starts out for 
Walhalla, humming to herself. 

Act 3 

The Forest Before the Iron Duck's Bureau 
Drawer. — Merglitz, who has up till this time held 
his peace, now descends from a balloon and demands 
the release of Betty. It has been the will of Wotan 
that Merglitz and Betty should meet on earth and 
hate each other like poison, but Zweiback, the drug- 
gist of the gods, has disobeyed and concocted a 
love-potion which has rendered the young couple 
very unpleasant company. Wotan, enraged, de- 
stroys them with a protracted heat spell. 

Encouraged by this sudden turn of affairs, Immer- 
gliick comes to earth in a boat drawn by four white 

[80] 



OPERA SYNOPSES 

Holsteins, and, seated alone on a rock, remembers 
aloud to herself the days when she was a girl. Pil- 
grims from Augenblick, on their way to worship at 
the shrine of Schmiirr, hear the sound of remi- 
niscence coming from the rock and stop in their 
march to sing a hymn of praise for the drying up 
of the crops. They do not recognize Immergliick, 
as she has her hair done differently, and think that 
she is a beggar girl selling pencils. 

In the m.eantime, Ragel, the papercutter of the 
gods, has fashioned himself a sword on the forge 
of Schmalz, and has called the weapon " Assistance- 
in-Emergency.'^ Armed with '^Assistance-in-Emer- 
gency " he comes to earth, determined to slay the 
Iron Duck and carry off the beautiful Irma. 

But Frimsel overhears the plan and has a drink 
brewed which is given to Ragel in a golden goblet 
and which, when drunk, makes him forget his past 
and causes him to believe that he is Schnorr, the 
God of Fun. While laboring under this spell, 
Ragel has a funeral pyre built on the summit of a 
high mountain and, after lighting it, climbs on top 
of it with a mandolin which he plays until he is 
consumed. 

Immergliick never marries. 



[8i] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

II 

IL MINNESTRONE 

(Peasant Love) 

Scene: Venice and Old Point Comfort 
Time: Early i6th Century, 

Cast 

Alfonso, Duke of Minnestrone Baritone 

Partola, a Peasant Girl Soprano 



Cleanso 
Turing 

BOMBO 



Tenor 



Young Noblemen of Venice. < Tenor 

[ Basso 

LuDOVico ) Assassins in the service of ( Basso 

AsTOLFO ) Cafeteria Rusticana ( Methodist 

Townspeople, Cabbies and Sparrows 

Argument 

" II Minnestrone " is an allegory of the two sides 
of a man's nature (good and bad), ending at last 
in an awfully comical mess with everyone dead. 

Act I 

A Public Square, Ferrara. — During a peasant 
festival held to celebrate the sixth consecutive day 
of rain, Rudolpho, a young nobleman, sees Lilliano, 

[82] 



OPERA SYNOPSES 

daughter of the village bell-ringer, dancing along 
throwing artificial roses at herself. He asks of his 
secretary who the young woman is, and his secre- 
tary, in order to confuse Rudolpho and thereby 
win the hand of his ward, tells him that it is his 
( Rudolpho 's) own mother, disguised for the fes- 
tival. Rudolpho is astounded. He orders her 
arrest. 

Act 2 

Banquet Hall in Gorgio's Palace. — Lilliano has 
not forgotten Breda, her old nurse, in spite of her 
troubles, and determines to avenge herself for the 
many insults she received in her youth by poisoning 
her (Breda). She therefore invites the old nurse 
to a banquet and poisons her. Presently a knock is 
heard. It is Ugolfo. He has come to carry away 
the body of Michelo and to leave an extra quart 
of pasteurized. Lilliano tells him that she no 
longer loves him, at which he goes away, dragging 
his feet sulkily. 

Act 3 

In Front of EmiWs House. — Still thinking of the 
old man's curse, Borsa has an interview with 
Cleanso, believing him to be the Duke's wife. He 
tells him things can't go on as they are, and Cleanso 
stabs him. Just at this moment Betty comes rush- 

[83] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

ing in from school and falls in a faint. Her worst 
fears have been realized. She has been insulted by 
Sigmundo, and presently dies of old age. In a 
fury, Ugolfo rushes out to kill Sigmundo and, as he 
does so, the dying Rosenblatt rises on one elbow 
and curses his mother. 

Ill 
LUCY DE LIMA 

Scene: Wales. 

Time: lyoo (Greenwich). 

Cast 

William Wont, Lord of Glennnn Basso 

Lucy Wagstaff, his daughter Soprano 

Bertram, her lover Tenor 

Lord Roger, jriend of Bertram Soprano 

Irma, attendant to Lucy Basso 

Friends, Retainers and Members of the local 
Lodge of Elks. 

Argument 

" Lucy de Lima,'^ is founded on the well-known 
story by Boccaccio of the same name and address. 

[84] 



OPERA SYNOPSES 

Act I 

Gypsy Camp Near Waterbury. — The gypsies, 
led by Edith, go singing through the camp on the 
way to the fair. Following them comes Despard, 
the gypsy leader, carrying Ethel, whom he has just 
kidnapped from her father, who had previously just 
kidnapped her from her mother. Despard places 
Ethel on the ground and tells Mona, the old hag, 
to watch over her. Mona nurses a secret grudge 
against Despard for having once cut off her leg and 
decides to change Ethel for Nettie, another kid- 
napped child. Ethel pleads with Mona to let her 
stay with Despard, for she has fallen in love with 
him on the ride over. But Mona is obdurate. 

Act 2 

The Fair, — A crowd of sightseers and villagers 
is present. Roger appears, looking for Laura. He 
can not find her. Laura appears, looking for 
Roger. She can not find him. The gypsy queen 
approaches Roger and thrusts into his hand the 
locket stolen from Lord Brym. Roger looks at it 
and is frozen with astonishment, for it contains the 
portrait of his mother when she was in high school. 
He then realizes that Laura must be his sister, and 
starts out to find her. 

[85] 



I 

LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Act 3 

Hall in the Castle. — Lucy is seen surrounded by 
every luxury, but her heart is sad. She has just been 
shown a forged letter from Stewart saying that he 
no longer loves her, and she remembers her old free 
life in the mountains and longs for another romp 
with Ravensbane and Wolfshead, her old pair of 
rompers. The guests begin to assemble for the 
wedding, each bringing a roast ox. They chide 
Lucy for not having her dress changed. Just at 
this moment the gypsy band bursts in and Cleon 
tells the wedding party that Elsie and not Edith 
is the child who was stolen from the summer-house, 
showing the blood-stained derby as proof. At this, 
Lord Brym repents and gives his blessing on the 
pair, while the fishermen and their wives celebrate 
in the courtyard. 



[86] 



XVII 
THE YOUNG IDEA'S SHOOTING GALLERY 

SINCE we were determined to have Junior edu- 
cated according to modern methods of child 
training, a year and a half did not seem too 
early an age at which to begin. As Doris said: 
" There is no reason why a child of a year and a 
half shouldn't have rudimentary cravings for self- 
expression." And really, there isn't any reason, 
when you come right down to it. 

Doris had been reading books on the subject, and 
had been talking with Mrs. Deemster. Most of 
the trouble in our town can be traced back to some- 
one's having been talking with Mrs. Deemster. 
Mrs. Deemster brings an evangelical note into the 
simplest social conversations, so that by the time 
your wife is through the second piece of cinnamon 
toast she is convinced that all children should have 
their knee-pants removed before they are four, or 
that you should hire four servants a day on three- 
hour shifts, or that, as in the present case, no child 
should be sent to a regular school until he has 

[87] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

determined for himself what his profession is going 
to be and then should be sent straight from the home 
to Johns Hopkins or the Sorbonne. 

Junior was to be left entirely to himself, the 
theory being that he would find self-expression in 
some form or other, and that by watching him care- 
fully it could be determined just what should be 
developed in him, or, rather, just what he should be 
allowed to develop in himself. He was not to be 
corrected in any way, or guided, and he was to call 
us " Doris " and '' Monty " instead of " Mother " 
and '' Father." We were to be just pals, nothing 
more. Otherwise, his individuality would become 
submerged. I was, however, to be allowed to pay 
what few bills he might incur until he should find 
himself. 

The first month that Junior was " on his own," 
striving for self-expression, he spent practically 
every waking hour of each day in picking the mortar 
out from between the bricks in the fire-place and 
eating it. 

"Don't you think you ought to suggest to him 
that nobody who really is anybody eats mortar? " 
I said. 

" I don't like to interfere," replied Doris. " I'm 
trying to figure out what it may mean. He may 
have the makings of a sculptor in him." But one 



THE YOUNG IDEA'S SHOOTING GALLERY 

could see that she was a little worried, so I didn't 
say the cheap and obvious thing, that at any rate 
he had the makings of a sculpture in him or would 
have in a few more days of self-expression. 

Soft putty -was put at his disposal, in case he 
might feel like doing a little modeling. We didn't 
expect m.uch of him at first, of course; maybe just 
a panther or a little General Sherman; but if that 
was to be his metier we weren't going to have it said 
that his career was nipped in the bud for the lack of 
a little putty. 

The first thing that he did was to stop up the 
keyhole in the bath-room door while I was in the 
tub, so that I had to crawl out on the piazza roof 
and into the guest-room window. It did seem as if 
there might be some way of preventing a recurrence 
of that sort of thing without submerging his indi- 
viduality too much. But Doris said no. If he were 
disciplined now, he would grow up nursing a complex 
against putty and against me and might even try 
to marry Aunt Marian. She had read of a little boy 
who had been punished by his father for putting 
soap on the cellar stairs, and from that time on, all 
the rest of his life, every time he saw soap he went 
to bed and dreamed that he was riding in the cab 
of a runaway engine dressed as Perriot, which meant, 

[89] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

of course, that he had a suppressed desire to kill his 
father. 

It almost seemed, however, as if the risk were 
worth taking if Junior could be shown the funda- 
mentally anti-social nature of an act like stuffing 
keyholes with putty, but nothing was done about it 
except to take the putty supply away for that day. 

The chief trouble came, however, in Junior's 
contacts with other neighborhood children whose 
parents had not seen the light. When Junior 
would lead a movement among the young bloods 
to pull up the Hemmings' nasturtiums or would 
show flashes of personality by hitting little Leda 
Hemming over the forehead with a trowel, Mrs. 
Hemming could never be made to see that to 
reprimand Junior would be to crush out his God- 
given individuality. All she would say was, " Just 
look at those nasturtiums! " over and over again. 
And the Hemming children were given to under- 
stand that it would be all right if they didn't play 
with Junior quite so much. 

This morning, however, the thing solved itself. 
While expressing himself in putty in the nursery, 
Junior succeeded in making a really excellent life- 
mask of Mrs. Deemster's fourteen-months-old little 

[90] 




Mrs. Deemster didn't enter into the spirit of the thing at all. 



THE YOUNG IDEA'S SHOOTING GALLERY 

girl who had come over to spend the morning with 
him. She had a little difficulty in breathing, but it 
really was a fine mask. Mrs. Deemster, however, 
didn't enter into the spirit of the thing at all, and 
after excavating her little girl, took Doris aside. 
It was decided that Junior is perhaps too young to 
start in on his career unguided. 

That is Junior that you can hear now, I think. 



[91] 



XVIII 

POLYP WITH A PAST 

The Story of an Organism With a Heart 

OF all forms of animal life, the polyp is prob- 
ably the most neglected by fanciers. People 
seem willing to pay attention to anything, cats, 
lizards, canaries, or even fish, but simply because 
the polyp is reserved by nature and not given to 
showing off or wearing its heart on its sleeve, it is 
left alone under the sea to slave away at coral- 
building with never a kind word or a pat on the 
tentacles from anybody. 

It was quite by accident that I was brought face 
to face with the human side of a polyp. I had 
been working on a thesis on ^' Emotional Crises in 
Sponge Life," and came upon a polyp formation on 
a piece of coral in the course of my laboratory work. 
To say that I was astounded would be putting it 
mildly. I was surprised. 

The difficulty in research work in this field came 
in isolating a single pol3rp from the rest in order 
to study the personal peculiarities of the little organ- 
ism, for, as is so often the case (even, I fear, with 

[92] 



POLYP WITH A PAST 

us great big humans sometimes), the individual 
behaves in an entirely different manner in private 
from the one he adopts when there is a crowd around. 
And a polyp, among all creatures, has a minimum of 
time to himself in which to sit down and think. 
There is always a crowd of other polyps dropping 
in on him, urging him to make a fourth in a string 
of coral beads or just to come out and stick around 
on a rock for the sake of good-fellowship. 

The one which I finally succeeded in isolating 
was an engaging organism with a provocative manner 
and a little way of wrinkling up its ectoderm which 
put you at once at your ease. There could be no 
formality about your relations with this polyp five 
minutes after your first meeting. You were just 
like one great big family. 

Although I have no desire to retail gossip, I think 
that readers of this treatise ought to be made aware 
of the fact (if, indeed, they do not already know 
it) that a polyp is really neither one thing nor 
another in matters of gender. One day it may be 
a little boy polyp, another day a little girl, accord- 
ing to its whim or practical considerations of policy. 
On gray days, when everything seems to be going 
wrong, it may decide that it will be neither boy nor 
girl but will just drift. I think that if we big 
human cousins of the little polyp were to follow 

[93] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

the example set by these lowliest of God's creatures 
in this matter, we all would find ourselves much 
better off in the end. Am I not right, little polyp? 

What was my surprise, then, to discover my little 
friend one day in a gloomy and morose mood. It 
refused the peanut-butter which I had brought it 
and I observed through the microscope that it was 
shaking writh sobs. Lifting it up with a pair of 
pincers I took it over to the window to let it watch 
the automobiles go by, a diversion which had, in the 
past, never failed to amuse. But I could see that 
it was not interested. A tune from the victrola fell 
equally flat, even though I set my little charge on 
the center of the disc and allowed it to revolve at 
a dizzy pace, which frolic usually sent it into spasms 
of excited giggling. Something was wrong. It was 
under emotional stress of the most racking kind. 

I consulted Klunzinger's " Die Korallenthiere des 
Rothen Meeres " and there found that at an early 
age the polyp is quite likely to become the victim 
of a sentimental passion which is directed at its 
own self. 

In other words, my tiny companion was in love 
with itself, bitterly, desperately, head-over-heels in 
love. 

In an attempt to divert it from this madness, I 
took it on an extended tour of the Continent, visiting 

[94] 



POLYP WITH A PAST 

all the old cathedrals and stopping at none but the 
best hotels. The malady grew worse, instead of 
better. I thought that perhaps the warm sun of 
Granada would bring the color back into those pale 
tentacles, but there the inevitable romance in the 
soft air was only fuel to the flamey and, in the 
shadow of the Alhambra, my little polyp gave up 
the fight and died of a broken heart without ever 
having declared its love to itself. 

I returned to America shortly after not a little 
chastened by what I had witnessed of Nature's won- 
ders in the realm of passion. 



[95] 



XIX 

HOLT! WHO GOES THERE ? 

THE reliance of young mothers on Dr. Emmett 
Holt's " The Care and Feeding of Children," 
has become a national custom. Especially during 
the early infancy of the first baby does the 
son rise and set by what " Holt says." But there 
are several questions which come to mind which 
are not included in the handy questionnaire 
arranged by the noted child-specialist, and as he is 
probably too busy to answer them himself, we have 
compiled an appendix which he may incorporate in 
the next edition of his book, if he cares to. Of 
course, if he doesn't care to it isn't compulsory. 

BATHING 

What should the parent wear while bathing the 
child? 

A rubber loin-cloth will usually be sufficient, with 
perhaps a pair of elbow-guards and anti-skid gloves. 
A bath should never be given a child until at least 

[96] 



HOLT! WHO GOES THERE? 

one hour after eating (that is, after the parent has 
eaten). 

What are the objections to j ace-cloths as a means 
of bathing children? 

They are too easily swallowed, and after six or 
seven wet face-cloths have been swallowed, the child 
is likely to become heavy and lethargic. 

Under what circumstances should the daily tub- 
bath be omitted? 

Almost any excuse will do. The bath-room may 
be too cold, or too hot, or the child may be too 
sleepy or too wide-awake, or the parent may have 
lame knees or lead poisoning. And anyway, the 
child had a good bath yesterday. 

CLOTHING 

How should the in j ant be held during dressing and 
undressing? 

Any carpenter will be glad to sell you a vise which 
can be attached to the edge of the table. Place the 
infant in the vise and turn the screw until there is 
a slight redness under the pressure. Be careful not 
to turn it too tight or the child will resent it; but on 
the other hand, care should be taken not to leave it 
too loose, otherwise the child will be continually 

[97] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

falling out on the floor, and you will never get it 
dressed that way. 

What are the most important items in the baby's 
clothing? 

The safety-pins which are in the bureau in the 
next room. 

WEIGHT 

How should a child be weighed? 

Place the child in the scales. The father should 
then sit on top of the child to hold him down. Weigh 
father and child together. Then deduct the father's 
weight from the gross tonnage, and the weight of 
the child is the result. 

FRESH AIR 

What are the objections to an infant's sleeping out- 
of-doors? 
Sleeping out-of-doors in the city is all right, but 
children sleeping out of doors in the country are 
likely to be kissed by wandering cows and things. 
This should never be permitted under any circum- 
stances. 

DEVELOPMENT 

When does the infant first laugh aloud? 
When father tries to pin it up for the first time. 

[98] 



HOLT! WHO GOES THERE? 

// at two years the child makes no attempt to talk, 
what should be suspected? 

That it hasn't yet seen anyone worth talking to. 

FEEDING 

What should not be fed to a child? 
Ripe olives. 

How do we know how much jood a healthy child 
needs? 

By listening carefully. 

Which parent should go and get the child's early 
morning bottle? 

The one least able to feign sleep. 



[99] 



XX 

THE COMMITTEE ON THE WHOLE 

ANEW plan has just been submitted for run- 
ning the railroads. That makes one hundred 
and eleven. 

The present suggestion involves the services of 
some sixteen committees. Now presumably the 
idea is to get the roses back into the cheeks of the 
railroads, so that they will go running about from 
place to place again and perhaps make a little 
money on pleasant Saturdays and Sundays. But if 
these proposed committees are anything like other 
committees which we have had to do with, the fol- 
lowing will be a fair example of how our railroads 
will be run. 

The sub-committee on the Punching of Rebate 
Slips will have a meeting called for five o'clock in 
the private grill-room at the Pan-American Build- 
ing. Postcards will have been sent out the day be- 
fore by the Secretary, saying: " Please try to be 
present as there are several important matters to be 
brought up." This will so pique the curiosity of 
the members that they will hardly be able to wait 

[ 100 ] 



THE COMMITTEE ON THE WHOLE 

until five o'clock. One will come at four o'clock by 
mistake and, after steaming up and down the cor- 
ridor for half an hour, will go home and send in his 
resignation. 

At 5:10 the Secretary will bustle in with a brief- 
case and a map showing the weather areas over the 
entire United States for the preceding year. He will 
be very warm from hurrying. 

At 5:15 two members of the committee will stroll 
in, one of them saying to the other: " — so the 
Irishman turns to the Jew and says: ^ Well, I knew 
your father before that! ' Aha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha ! *I 
knew your father before that! ' " 

They will then seat themselves at one end of the 
committee-table, just as another member comes 
hurrying in. Time 5:21. 

One of the story-tellers being the Chairman, he 
will pound half-heartedly on the table and say: '' As 
some of us have to get away early, I think that 
we had better begin now, although Mr. Entwhistle 
and Dr. Pearly are not here." 

" I met Dr. Pearly last night at the Vegetarian 
Club dinner," says one of the members, " and he 
said that he might be a little late today but that he 
would surely come." 

" His wife has just had a very delicate throat 
operation, I understand," offers a committeeman 

[ loi J 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

who is drawing concentric circles on his pad of 
paper. 

" Bad weather for throat operations/' says the 
Secretary. 

" That's right," says the Chairman, looking 
through a pile of papers for one which he has left 
at home. " But let's get down to business. At the 
last meeting the question arose as to whether or 
not it was advisable to continue having conductors 
punch the little hole at the bottom of rebate slips. 
As you know, the slip says, ^ Not redeemable if 
punched here.' Now, someone brought up the point 
that it seems silly to give out a rebate slip at all if 
there isn't going to be any rebate on it. A sub- 
committee was appointed to go into the matter, and 
I would like to ask Mr. Twing, the chairman, what 
he has to report." 

Mr. Twing will clear his throat and start to 
speak, but will make only an abortive sound. He 
will then clear his throat again. 

" Mr. Chairman, the other members of the sub- 
committee and myself were unable to get exactly the 
data on this that we wanted and I delegated Mr. 
Entwhistle to dig up something which he said he 
had read recently in the files of the Scientific Amer- 
ican. But Mr. Entwhistle doesn't seem to be here 
today, and so I am unable to report his findings. 

[102] 



jii^ 




"That's right," sa3S the chairman. 



THE COMMITTEE ON THE WHOLE 

It was, however, the sense of the meeting that the 
conductors should not." 

" Should not what? " inquires Dr. Pearly, who 
has just sneaked in, knocking three hats to the floor 
while hanging up his coat. 

Dr. Pearly is never answered, for the Chairman 
looks at his watch and says: ^'.I'm very sorry, gen- 
tlemen, but I have an appointment at 5:45 and 
must be going. Supposing I appoint a sub-commit- 
tee consisting of Dr. Pearly, Mr. Twing and Mr. 
Berry, to find Mr. Entwhistle and see what he 
dug out of the files of the Scientific American. 
Then, at the next meeting we can have a report 
from both sub-committees and will also hear from 
Professor McKlicktric, who has just returned from 
Panama. ... A motion to adjourn is now in order. 
Do I hear such a motion? " 

After listening carefully, he hears it, and the rail- 
roads run themselves for another week. 



[103] 



XXI 
NOTING AN INCREASE IN BIGAMY 

EITHER more men are marrying more wives 
than ever before, or they are getting more 
careless about it. During the past week bigamy 
has crowded baseball out of the papers, and while 
this may be due in part to the fact that it was a 
cold, rainy week and little baseball could be played, 
yet there is a tendency to be noted there some- 
where. All those wishing to note a tendency will 
continue on into the next paragraph. 

There is, of course, nothing new in bigamy. Any- 
one who goes in for it with the idea of originating 
a new fad which shall be known by his name, like 
the daguerreotype or potatoes O'Brien, will have to 
reckon with the priority claims of several hundred 
generations of historical characters, most of them 
wearing brown beards. Just why beards and 
bigamy seem to have gone hand in hand through 
the ages is a matter for the professional humorists to 
determine. We certainly haven't got time to do it 
here. 

But the multiple-marriages unearthed during the 

[ 104] 



NOTING AN INCREASE IN BIGAMY 

past week have a certain homey flavor lacking in 
some of those which have gone before. For in- 
stance, the man in New Jersey who had two wives 
living right with him all of the time in the same 
apartment. No need for subterfuge here, no de- 
ceiving one about the other. It was just a matter 
of walking back and forth between the dining-room 
and the study. This is, of course, bigamy under 
ideal conditions. 

But in tracing a tendency like this, we must not 
deal so much with concrete cases as with drifts and 
curves. A couple of statistics are also necessary, 
especially if it is an alarming tendency that is being 
traced. The statistics follow, in alphabetical 
order: 

In the United States during the years 191 8-19 19 
there were 4,956,673 weddings. 2,485,845 of these 
were church weddings, strongly against the wishes 
of the bridegrooms concerned. In these weddings 
10,489,392 silver olive-forks were received as gifts. 

Starting with these figures as a basis, we turn to 
the report of the Pennsylvania State Committee on 
Outdoor Gymnastics for the year beginning January 
4th, 1920, and ending a year later. 

This report being pretty fairly uninteresting, we 
leave it and turn to another report, which covers 
the manufacture and sale of rugs. This has a 

[los] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

picture of a rug in it, and a darned good likeness 
it is, too. 

In this rug report we find that it takes a Navajo 
Indian only eleven days to weave a rug 12x5, with 
a swastika design in the middle. Eleven days. It 
seems incredible. Why, it takes only 365 days to 
make a year! 

Now, having seen that there are 73,000 men and 
women in this country today who can neither read 
nor write, and that of these only 4%, or a little over 
half, are colored, what are we to conclude? What 
is to be the effect on our national morale? Who 
is to pay this gigantic bill for naval armament? 

Before answering these questions any further 
than this, let us quote from an authority on the 
subject, a man who has given the best years, or at 
any rate some very good years, of his life to re- 
search in this field, and who now takes exactly the 
stand which we have been outlining in this article. 

^' I would not," he says in a speech delivered 
before the Girls' Friendly Society of Laurel Hill, 
^' I would not for one minute detract from the glory 
of those who have brought this country to its 
present state of financial prominence among the 
nations of the world, and yet as I think back on 
those dark days, I am impelled to voice the protest 
of millions of American citizens yet unborn." 

[106] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Perhaps some of our little readers remember 
what the major premise of this article was. If so, 
will they please communicate with the writer. 

Oh, yes! Bigamy! 

Well, it certainly is funny how many cases of 
bigamy you hear about nowadays. Either more 
men are marrying more wives than ever before, or 
they are getting more careless about it. (That 
sounds very, very familiar. It is barely possible 
that it is the sentence with which this article opens. 
We say so many things in the course of one article 
that repetitions are quite likely to creep in). 

At any rate, the tendency seems to be toward 
an increase in bigamy. 



[107] 



XXII 

THE REAL WIGLAF: MAN AND 
MONARCH 

Much time has been devoted of late by ardent biog- 
raphers to shedding light on misunderstood characters 
in history, especially British rulers. We cannot let 
injustice any longer be done to King Wiglaf, the much- 
maligned monarch of central Britain in the early Ninth 
Century. 

The fall of the kingdom of Mercia in 828 under the 
the onslaughts of Ecgberht the West-Saxon, have been 
laid to Wiglaf's untidy personal habits and his alleged 
mania for practical joking. The accompanying bio- 
graphical sketch may serve to disclose some of the more 
intimate details of the character of the man and to alter 
in some degree history's unfavorable estimate of him. 

OUR first glimpse of the Wiglaf who was one 
day to become ruler of Mercia, the heart of 
present-day England (music, please), is when at 
the age of seven he was taken by Oswier, his father's 
murderer, to see Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth. 
(Every subject of biographical treatment, regardless 
of the period in which he or she lived, must have 
been taken at an early age to see Mrs. Siddons 
play Lady Macbeth. It is part of the code of 
biography.) 

[108] 



THE REAL WIGLAF 

While sitting in the royal box, the young prince 
Wiglaf was asked what he thought of the perform- 
ance. '' Rotten! ^' he answered, and left the place 
abruptly, setting fire to the building as he went out. 

Beobald, in citing the above incident in his 
" Chronicles of Comical Kings/' calls it ^' an hendy 
hap ichabbe y-hent." And perhaps he's right. 

Events proceeded in rapid succession after this 
for the young boy and we next find him facing 
marriage with a stiff upper-lip. Mystery has always 
surrounded the reasons which led to the choice of 
Princess Offa as Wiglaf's bride. In fact, it has 
never been quite certain whether or not she was 
his bride. No one ever saw them together.^ On 
several occasions he is reported to have asked his 
chamberlain who she was as she passed by on the 
street.^ 

And yet the theory persists that she was his wife, 
owing doubtless to the fact that on the eve of the 
Battle of Otford he sent a message to her asking 
where " in God's name " his clean shirts had been 
put when they came back from the wash. 

We come now to that period in Wiglaf's life which 
has been for so many centuries the cause of his- 

1 Lebody. Witnesses of the Proximity of Wiglaf to Offa. II. 
265. 

2 Rouguet. Famous Questions in History. III. 467. 

[109] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

torical speculation, pro and con. The reference is, 
of course, to his dealings with Aethelbald, the 
ambassador from Wessex. Every schoolboy has 
taken part in the Wiglaf-Aethelbald controversy, 
but how many really know the inside facts of the 
case? 

Examination of the correspondence between these 
two men shows Wiglaf to have been simply a great, 
big-hearted, overgrown boy in the whole affair. All 
claims of his having had an eye on the throne of 
Northumbria fade away under the delightful in- 
genuousness of his attitude as expressed in these 
letters. 

^' I should of thought,'^ he writes in 821 to his 
sister, " that anyone who w^as not cock-ide drunk 
would have known better than to of tried to walk 
bear-foot through that eel-grass from the beech up 
to the bath-house without sneekers on, which is 
what that ninn Aethelbald tryed to do this AM. 
Well say laffter is no name for w^hat you would of 
done if you had seen him. He looked like he was 
trying to walk a tide-rope. Hey I yelled at him 
all the way, do you think you are trying to walk a 
tide-rope? Well say maybe that didnt make him 



sore." 



Shortly after this letter was written, Wiglaf as- 
cended the throne of Mercia, his father having 

[no] 



THE REAL WIGLAF 

disappeared Saturday night without trace. A 
peasant ^ some years after said that he met the old 
king walking along a road near what is now the 
Scottish border, telling people that he was carrying 
a letter of greeting from the Mayor of Pontygn to 
the Mayor of Langoscgirh. Others say that he fell 
into the sea off the coast of Wales and became what 
is now known as King's Rocks. This last has never 
been authenticated. 

At any rate, the son, on ascending the throne, be- 
came king. His first official act was to order dinner. 
" A nice, juicy steak," he is said to have called for,^ 
" French fries, apple pie and a cup of coffee." It 
is probable that he really said " a coff of cuppee," 
however, as he was a wag of the first water and 
loved a joke as well as the next king. 

We are now thrown into the maelstrom of con- 
tradictory historical data, some of which credits 
Wiglaf with being the greatest ruler Mercia ever had 
and some of which indicates that he was nothing 
but a royal bum. It is not the purpose of this biog- 
graphy to try to settle the dispute. All we know 
for a fact is that he was a very human man who had 
faults like the rest of us and that shortly after be- 
coming king he disappears from view. 

^ Peasant Tales and Fun-making. II. 965. 
2 Fifty Menus for August. — 46. 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

His reign began at 4 p. m. one Wednesday (no, 
Thursday) afternoon and early the next morning 
Mercia was overrun by the West-Saxons. It is 
probable that King Wiglaf was sold for old silver 
to help pay expenses. 



[112] 



XXIII 

FACING THE BOYS' CAMP 
PROBLEM 

THE time seemed to have come to send Junior 
away to a boys' camp for the summer. He 
was getting too large to have about the house during 
the hot weather, and besides, getting him out of 
town seemed the only way to stop the radio con- 
certs which had been making a continuous Chau- 
tauqua of our home-life ever since March. 

I therefore got out a magazine and turned to that 
section of the advertising headed, ''Summer Camps 
and Schools." There was a staggering array. Judg- 
ing from the photographs the entire child population 
of the United States spent last summer in bathing 
suits or on horseback, and the pictures of them were 
so generic and familiar-looking that there was a 
great temptation to spend the evening scrutinizing 
them closely to see if you could pick out anyone 
you knew. 

''Come on, read some out loud," said Doris in 
her practical way. 

" ' The Nooga-Wooga Camps,' " I began. " ' The 

[113] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Garden Spot of the Micasset Mountains. Tumbling 
water, calls of birds, light-hearted laughter, horse- 
back rides along shady trails, lasting friendships — 
all these are the heritage of happy days at Nooga- 
Wooga/ ... I don't think much of the costumes 
they give the boys to wear at Nooga-Wooga. They 
look rather sissy to me." 

" That's because you are looking at the Camps for 
Girls, dear," said Doris. " Those are girls in Peter 
Thompsons and bloomers." 

Hurriedly turning the page, I came to Camps for 
Boys. 

^' ^ Camp Wicomagisset, for Manly Boys. On fa- 
mous Lake Pogoniblick in the heart of the far-famed 
Wappahammock district. Campfire stories, mili- 
tary drill, mountain climbing, swimming, wading, 
hiking, log-cabins, sailing — ' they say nothing about 
horseshoeing. Don't you suppose they teach horse- 
shoeing? " 

" That probably comes in the second year for 
the older boys," said Doris. ^' I wouldn't want 
Junior to plunge right into horseshoeing his first 
season. We mustn't rush him." 

" ' Camp Wad-ne-go-gallup on the shores of 
Crisco Bay, Maine. Facing that grandest of all 
oceans, the Atlantic. Located among the best farms 
where fresh and wholesome food can be had in 

[114] 



FACING THE BOY'S CAMP PROBLEM 

abundance ' — yes but is it had, my dear? That's 
the question. Anyway, I don't like the looks of 
the boat in the picture. It's too full of boys." 

" ' Opossum Mountain Camp for Boys. Un- 
usual sports and trips ' — Ah, possibly condor stalk- 
ing! That certainly would be unusual. But dan- 
gerous! I'd hate to think of Junior crawling about 
over ledges, stalking condors. And it says here 
that there is a dietitian and a camp-mother, as well." 

"Camp-mother?" Doris sniffed, "Probably she 
thinks she knows how to bring up children — " 

Just then Junior came in to announce that he 
had signed up for a job for the summer, working 
on the farm of Eddie Westover's uncle. So in view 
of this added income, I felt that I could afford a 
little vacation myself, and am leaving on July ist 
for Camp Mionogonett in the foothills of the Roko- 
mokos, " a Paradise for Manly Men." 



[115] 



XXIV 

ALL ABOUT THE SILESIAN 
PROBLEM 

SO much controversy has been aroused over 
Silesia it is high time that the average man in 
this country had a clearer idea of the problem. 
At present many people think that if you add oxy- 
gen to Silesia you will get oxide of silesia and can 
take spots out of clothes with it. 

A definite statement of the whole Upper Silesian 
question is therefore due, and, for those who care 
to listen, about to be made. 

The trouble started at the treaty of Noblitz in 
1773. You have no idea what a perfectly rotten 
treaty that was. It was negotiated by the Grand 
Duke Ludwig of Saxe-Goatherd-Cobalt, whose sis- 
ter married a Morrisey and settled in Fall River. 
The aim and ambition of Ludwig's life was to annex 
Spielzeugingen to Nichtrauschen, thereby augment- 
ing his duchy and at the same time having a dandy 
time. And he was the kind of man who would stop 
at nothing when it came time to augment his duchy. 

In this treaty, then, Ludwig insisted on a clause 

[116] 



ALL ABOUT THE SILESIAN PROBLEM 

making Silesia a monogamy. This was very clever, 
as it brought the Centrist party in Silesia into direct 
conflict with the party who wanted to restore the 
young Prince Niblick to the throne; thereby caus- 
ing no end of trouble and nasty feeling. 

With these obstacles out of the way, the greed 
and ambition of Ludwig were practically unre- 
strained. In factj some historians say that they 
knew no bounds. Summoning the Storkrath, or 
common council (composed of three classes: the 
nobles, the welterweights, and the licensed pilots) 
he said to them: (according to Taine) 

" An army can travel ten days on its stomach, 
but who the hell wants to be an army? " 

This saying has become a by-word in history 
and is now remembered long after the Grand Duke 
Ludwig has been forgotten. But at the time, Lud- 
wig received nothing short of an ovation for it, 
and succeeded in winning over the obstructionists 
to his side. This made everyone in favor of his 
disposition of Silesia except the Silesians. And, as 
they could neither read nor write, they thought 
that they still belonged to Holland and cheered a 
dyke every time they saw one. 

The question remained in abeyance therefore, for 
a century and a quarter. Then, in 1895, three 
years after the accession of Ralph Rittenhouse to 

[117] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

the throne of England, the storm broke again. The 
occasion was the partition of Parchesie by the Great 
Powers, by which the towns of Zweiback, Ulm- 
hausen and Ost Wilp were united to form what is 
known as the '' industrial triangle " on the Upper 
Silesian border. These towns are situated in the 
heart of the pumice district and could alone supply 
France and Germany with pumice for fifty years, 
provided it didn't rain. Bismarck once called Ost 
Wilp " the pumice heart of the world," and he was 
about right, too. 

It will therefore be seen how important it was to 
France that this '^ industrial triangle " on the Sile- 
sian border should belong to Germany. At the con- 
ference which designated the border line, Gambetta, 
representing France, insisted that the line should 
follow the course of the Iser River (" iser on one 
side or the other," was the way he is reported to 
have phrased it), which would divide the pumice 
deposits into three areas, the fourth being the 
dummy. This would never do. 

Experts were called in to see if it might not be 
possible to so divide the district that France might 
get a quarter, Germany a quarter and England 
fifty cents. It was suggested that the line be drawn 
down through Globe-Wernicke to the mouth of the 
Iser. As Gambetta said, the line had to be drawn 

[ii8] 



ALL ABOUT THE SILESIAN PROBLEM 

somewhere and it might as well be there. But Lord 
Hay-Paunceforte, representing England, refused to 
concede the point and for a time it looked like an 
open breach. But matters were smoothed over by 
the holding of a plebiscite in all the towns of Upper 
Silesia. The result of this plebiscite was taken and 
exactly reversed by the council, so that the entire 
Engadine Valley was given to Sweden, who didn't 
want it an3rway. 
And there the matter now stands. 



["9] 



XXV 

"HAPPY THE HOME WHERE 
BOOKS ARE FOUND" 

BY way of egging people on to buy Dr. Eliot's 
Five Foot Shelf of books, the publishers are 
resorting to an advertisement in which are depicted 
two married couples, one reading together by the 
library table, the other playing some two-handed 
game of cards which is evidently boring them con- 
siderably. The query is " Which One of These 
Couples Will be the Happier in Five Years? " the 
implication being that the young people who buy 
Dr. Eliot's books will, by constant reading aloud 
to each other from the works of the world's 
best writers, cement a companionship which will 
put to shame the illiterate union of the young card 
players. 

Granted that most two-handed games of cards are 
dull enough to result in divorce at the end of five 
years, they cannot be compared to co-operative 
family reading as a system of home- wrecking. If 
this were a betting periodical, we would have ten 
dollars to place on the chance of the following 

[I20] 



WHERE BOOKS ARE FOUND 

being the condition of affairs in the literary family 
at the end of the stated time: 

{The husband is reading his evening newspaper. 
The wife appears^ bringing a volume from the Five 
Foot Shelf. Tonight it is Darwin's " Origin of 
Species J') 

Wife: Hurry up and finish that paper. We'll 
never get along in this Darwin if we don't begin 
earlier than we did last night. 

Husband: Well, suppose we didn't get along 
in it. That would suit me all right. 

Wife: If you don't want me to read it to you, 
just say so . . . {after -thought) if it's so far over 
your head, just say so. 

Husband: It's not over my head at all. It's just 
dull. Why don't you read some more out of that 
Italian novel? 

Wife: Ugh! I hate that. I suppose you'd 
rather have me read " The Sheik." 

Husband {nastily) : No-I-wouldn't-rather- 
have-you-read- '^ The Sheik." Go on ahead with 
your Darwin., I'm listening. 

Wife: It's not my Darwin. I simply want to 
know a little something, that's all. Of course, you 
know everything, so you don't have to read any- 
thing more. 

[121] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Husband: Go on, go on. 

Wife: That last book we read was so far 
over — 

Husband: Go on, go on. 

Wife: (reads in an injured tone one and a half 
pages on the selective processes of pigeons) : You're 
asleep! 

Husband: I am not. The last words you read 
were " to this conclusion.'' 

Wife: Yes, well, what were the words before 
that? 

Husband: How should I know? I'm not learn- 
ing the thing to recite somewhere, am I? 

Wife: Well, it's very funny that you didn't no- 
tice when I read the last sentence backwards. 
And if you weren't asleep what were you doing with 
your eyes closed? 

Husband: I got smoke in them and was resting 
them for a minute. Haven't I got a right to rest 
my eyes a minute? 

Wife: I suppose it rests your eyes to breathe 
through your mouth and hold your head way over 
on one side. 

Husband: Yes it does, and wha'd'yer think of 
that? 

[ 122 ] 



I 




If you weren't asleep what were you doing with your eyes 

closed?" 



WHERE BOOKS ARE FOUND 

Wife: Go on and read your newspaper. That's 
just about your mental speed. 

Husband: I'm perfectly willing to read books 
in this set if you'd pick any decent ones. 
Wife: Yes, you are. 

Husband: Wha'd'yer mean " Yes you are "? 
Wife: Just what I said. 

(This goes on for ten minutes and then hus^ 
band draws a revolver and kills his wife.) 



[123] 



XXVI 

WHEN NOT IN ROME, WHY DO AS THE 
ROMANS DID? 

THERE is a growing sentiment among sign 
painters that when a sign or notice is to be 
put up in a public place it should be written in char- 
acters that are at least legible, so that, to quote 
" The Manchester Guardian " (as every one seems 
to do) " He who runs may read." 

This does not strike one as being an unseemly 
pandering to popular favor. The supposition is 
that the sign is put there to be read, otherwise it 
would have been turned over to an inmate of the 
Odd Fellows Home to be engraved on the head of 
a pin. And what could be a more fair require- 
ment than that it should be readable? 

Advertising, with its billboard message of rust- 
less screens and co-educational turkish-baths, has 
done much to further the good cause, and a glance 
through the files of newspapers of seventy-five 
years ago, when the big news story of the day was 
played up in diamond type easily deciphered in 
a strong light with the naked eye, shows that 

[124] 



WHY DO AS THE ROMANS DID? 

news printing has not, to use a slang phrase, stood 
still. 

But in the midst of this uniform progress we 
find a stagnant spot. Surrounded by legends that 
are patent and easy to read and understand, we find 
the stone-cutter and the architect still putting up 
tablets and cornerstones, monuments and cornices, 
with dates disguised in Roman numerals. It is as 
if it were a game, in which they were saying, " The 
number we are thinking of is even; it begins with 
M; it has five digits and when they are spread out, 
end to end, they occupy three feet of space. You 
have until we count to one hundred to guess what 
it is.'^ 

Roman numerals are all right for a rainy Sunday 
afternoon or to take a convalescent's mind from his 
illness, but to put them in a public place, where the 
reader stands a good chance of being run over by a 
dray if he spends more than fifty seconds in their 
perusal, is not in keeping with the efficiency of the 
age. If for no other reason than the extra space 
they take, involving more marble, more of the cut- 
ter's time and wear and tear on his instruments, 
not to mention the big overhead, you would think 
that Roman numerals would have been abolished 
long ago. 

Of course, they can be figured out if you're good 

[125] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

at that sort of thing. By working on your cuff and 
backs of envelopes, you can translate them in no 
time at all compared to the time taken by a cocoon 
to change into a butterfly, for instance. All you 
have to do is remember that " M " stands for either 
" millium/^ meaning thousand, or for " million." 
By referring to the context you can tell which is 
more probable. If, for example, it is a date, you 
can tell right away that it doesn't mean " million," 
for there isn't any " million " in our dates. And 
there is one-seventh or eighth of your number de- 
ciphered already. Then ^' C," of course, stands for 
" centum" which you can translate by working 
backwards at it, taking such a word as " century " 
or " per cent," and looking up what they come 
from, and there you have it! By this time it is 
hardly the middle of the afternoon, and all you 
have before you is a combination of X's, I's and an 
L, the latter standing for " Elevated Railway," and 
" Licorice," or, if you cross it with two little hori- 
zontal lines, it stands for the English pound, which 
is equivalent to about four dollars and eighty-odd 
cents in real money. Simple as sawing through 
a log. 

But it takes time. That's the big trouble with 
it. You can't do the right thing by the office and 
go in for Roman numerals, too. And since most 

[126] 



WHY DO AS THE ROMANS DID? 

of the people who pass such inscriptions are 
dependent on their own earnings, why not cater 
to them a bit and let them in on the secret? 

Probably the only reason that the people haven't 
risen up and demanded a reform along these lines 
is because so few of them really give a hang what 
the inscription says. If the American Antiquarian 
Turn-Verein doesn't care about stating in under- 
standable figures the date on which the cornerstone 
of their building was laid, the average citizen is 
perfectly willing to let the matter drop right there. 

But it would never do to revert to Roman num- 
erals in, say, the arrangement of time-tables. How 
long would the commuter stand it if he had to 
mumble to himself for twenty minutes and use up 
the margins of his newspaper before he could figure 
out what was the next train after the 5:18? Or 
this, over the telephone between wife and husband: 

"Hello, dear! I think I'll come in town for 
lunch. What trains can I get? " 

" Just a minute -~ I'll look them up. Hold the 
wire. . . . Let's see, here's one at XII:LVIII, that's 
twelve, and L is a thousand and V is five and three 
I's are three; that makes i2:one thousand. . . . 
that can't be right. . . . now XII certainly is 
twelve, and L . . . what does L stand for? . . .1 
say, what — does — L — stand — for? . . . Well, 

[127] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

ask Helma. . . . What does she say? . . . Fifty? 
. . . Sure, that makes it come out all right. . . . 
12:58. . . . What time is it now? . . . i o'clock? 
. . . Well, the next one leaves Oakam at I:XLIV. 
. . . that's ..." etc. 

Batting averages and the standing of teams in 
the leagues are another department where the intro- 
duction of Roman numerals would be suicide for 
the political party in power at the time. For of all 
things that are essential to the day's work of the 
voter, an early enlightenment in the matter of the 
home team's standing and the numerical progress 
of the favorite batsman are of primary importance. 
This information has to be gleaned on the way to 
work in the morning, and, except for those who 
come in to work each day from North Philadelphia 
or the Croton Reservoir, it would be a physical 
impossibility to figure the tables out and get any 
of the day's news besides. 

CLVB BATTING RECORDS 

Games At Bat Runs B.H. S.B, S.H. Aver. 

MMMMMXXCrX DCLITI MCCCXXXIH CLXVm CC CCLXH 

MMMMCMXL DLXXI MCCXLVI CLXXIX CCXXI CCXU 

MMMMCMXXXVTI DCXDC MCCXXXI CL CCXXI CCXLIX 

MMMMDCCCLXXIV DXXXIV MCXCI CXXXVI CCXXV CCXLV 

MMMMCMLXXXVn DLIV MCCXXX CLXXV CLXV CCXLVII 

Washington CLiu MUMMCMXxvni dv mcxc CLxm clxv ccxdi 

St. Louis CLV MMMMMX.XV DLXXIV MCCXXI CCVn ClJCn CCXLI 

Philadelphia cxLtx mmumdcccxxvi ccccxvi mcxlih cxLin clv ccxxxvn 

You Can't Do Right by the Office and Go in for 
Roman Numerals Too. 

[128] 



Detroit 


cxn 


Chicago 


CLI 


Cleveland 


CXII 


Boston 


CLI 


New York 


CL 



WHY DO AS THE ROMANS DID? 

On matters such as these the proletariat would 
have protested the Roman numeral long ago. If 
they are willing to let its reactionary use on tablets 
and monuments stand it is because of their indif- 
ference to influences which do not directly affect 
their pocketbooks. But if it could be put up to 
them in a powerful cartoon, showing the Architect 
and the Stone-Cutter dressed in frock coats and 
silk hats, with their pockets full of money, stepping 
on the Common People so that he cannot see what 
is written on the tablet behind them, then perhaps 
the public would realize how they are being im- 
posed on. 

For that there is an organized movement among 
architects and stone-cutters to keep these things 
from the citizenry there can no longer be any doubt. 
It is not only a matter of the Roman numerals. 
How about the use of the " V " when '' U " should 
be used? You will always see it in inscriptions. 
" SVMNER BVILDING " is one of the least offen- 
sive. Perhaps the excuse is that ^' V " is more 
adapted to stone-lettering. Then why not carry 
this principle out further? Why not use the letter 
H when S is meant? Or substitute K for B? If 
the idea is to deceive, and to make it easier for the 
stone-cutter, a pleasing effect could be got from 
the inscription, '' Erected in 1897 by the Society 

[ 129] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

of Arts and Grafts", by making it read: " EKEA- 
TEW IZ MXIXLXIXLXXII LY THE XNLIEZY 
OF AEXA ZNL ELAFTX." There you have 
letters that are all adapted to stone-cutting; they 
look well together, and they are, in toto, as intel- 
ligible as most inscriptions. 



[130] 



XXVII 

THE TOOTH, THE WHOLE TOOTH, AND 
NOTHING BUT THE TOOTH 

SOME well-known saying (it doesn't make much 
difference what) is proved by the fact that 
everyone likes to talk about his experiences at the 
dentist's. For years and years little articles like 
this have been written on the subject, little jokes 
like some that I shall presently make have been 
made, and people in general have been telling other 
people just what emotions they experience when 
they crawl into the old red plush guillotine. 

They like to explain to each other how they feel 
when the dentist puts " that buzzer thing " against 
their bicuspids, and, if sufficiently pressed, they will 
describe their sensations on mouthing a rubber dam. 

" I'll tell you what I hate," they will say with 
great relish, " when he takes that little nut-pick 
and begins to scrape. Ugh! " 

" Oh, I'll tell you what's worse than that," says 
the friend, not to be outdone, " when he is poking 
around careless-Hke, and strikes a nerve. Wow! " 

And if there are more than two people at the 

[131] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

experience-meeting, everyone will chip in and tell 
what he or she considers to be the worst phase of 
the dentist's work, all present enjoying the narra- 
tion hugely and none so much as the narrator who 
has suffered so. 

This sort of thing has been going on ever since 
the first mammoth gold tooth was hung out as a 
bait to folks in search of a good time. (By the 
way, when did the present obnoxious system of den- 
tistry begin? It can't be so very long ago that the 
electric auger was invented, and where would a 
dentist be without an electric auger? Yet you 
never hear of Amalgam Filling Day, or any other 
anniversary in the dental year). There must be 
a conspiracy of silence on the part of the trade to 
keep hidden the names of the men who are respon- 
sible for all this). 

However many years it may be that dentists have 
been plying their trade, in all that time people have 
never tired of talking about their teeth. This is 
probably due to the inscrutable workings of Nature 
who is always supplying new teeth to talk about. 

As a matter of fact, the actual time and suffering 
in the chair is only a fraction of the gross expendi- 
ture connected with the affair. The preliminary 
period, about which nobody talks, is much the 
worse. This dates from the discovery of the way- 

[ 132 ] 



THE TOOTH AND THE WHOLE TOOTH 

ward tooth and extends to the moment when the 
dentist places his foot on the automatic hoist which 
jacks you up into range. Giving gas for tooth- 
extraction is all very humane in its way, but the 
time for anaesthetics is when the patient first de- 
cides that he must go to the dentist. From then 
on, until the first excavation is started, should be 
shrouded in oblivion. 

There is probably no moment more appalling than 
that in which the tongue, running idly over the 
teeth in a moment of care-free play, comes suddenly 
upon the ragged edge of a space from which the 
old familiar filling has disappeared. The world 
stops and you look meditatively up to the corner 
of the ceiling. Then quickly you draw your tongue 
away, and try to laugh the affair off, saying to 
yourself: 

" Stuff and nonsense, my good fellow! There is 
nothing the matter with your tooth. Your nerves 
are upset after a hard day's work, that's all." 

Having decided this to your satisfaction, you 
slyly, and with a poor attempt at being casual, 
slide the tongue back along the line of adjacent 
teeth, hoping against hope that it will reach the 
end without mishap. 

But there it is! There can be no doubt about 
it this time. The tooth simply has got to be filled 

[ 133] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

by someone, and the only person who can fill it 
with anything permanent is a dentist. You wonder 
if you might not be able to patch it up yourself for 
the time being, — a year or so — perhaps with a 
little spruce-gum and a coating of new-skin. It is 
fairly far back, and wouldn't have to be a very 
sightly job. 

But this has an impracticable sound, even to you. 
You might want to eat some peanut-brittle (you 
never can tell when someone might offer you 
peanut-brittle these days), and the new-skin, while 
serviceable enough in the case of cream soups and 
custards, couldn't be expected to stand up under 
heavy crunching. 

So you admit that, since the thing has got to 
be filled, it might as well be a dentist who does the 
job. 

This much decided, all that is necessary is to 
call him up and make an appointment. 

Let us say that this resolve is made on Tuesday. 
That afternoon you start to look up the dentist's 
number in the telephone-book. A great wave of 
relief sweeps over you when you discover that it 
isn't there. How can you be expected to make an 
appointment with a man who hasnH got a tele- 
phone? And how can you have a tooth filled with- 
out making an appointment? The whole thing is 

[134] 



THE TOOTH AND THE WHOLE TOOTH 

impossible, and that's all there is to it. God knows 
you did your best. 

On Wednesday there is a slightly more insistent 
twinge, owing to bad management of a sip of ice- 
water. You decide that you simply must get in 
touch with that dentist when you get back from 
lunch. But you know how those things are. First 
one thing and then another came up, and a man 
came in from Providence who had to be shown 
around the office, and by the time you had a minute 
to yourself it was five o'clock. And, anyway, the 
tooth didn't bother you again. You wouldn't be 
surprised if, by being careful, you could get along 
with it as it is until the end of the week when you 
will have more time. A man has to think of his 
business, after all, and what is a little personal 
discomfort in the shape of an unfilled tooth to the 
satisfaction of work well done in the office? 

By Saturday morning you are fairly reconciled 
to going ahead, but it is only a half day and prob- 
ably he has no appointments left, anyway. Mon- 
day is really the time. You can begin the week 
afresh. After all, Monday is really the logical day 
to start in going to the dentist. 

Bright and early Monday morning you make 
another try at the telephone-book, and find, to your 
horror, that some time between now and last Tues- 

[135] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

day the dentist's name and number have been 
inserted into the directory. There it is. There is 
no getting around it: " Burgess, Jas. Kendal, DDS. 
. . . Courtland — 2654". There is really nothing 
left to do but to call him up. Fortunately the line 
is busy, which gives you a perfectly good excuse 
for putting it over until Tuesday. But on Tues- 
day luck is against you and you get a clear con- 
nection with the doctor himself. An appointment 
is arranged for Thursday afternoon at 3:30. 

Thursday afternoon, and here it is only Tuesday 
morning! Almost anything may happen between 
now and then. We might declare war on Mexico, 
and off you'd have to go, dentist appointment or no 
dentist appointment. Surely a man couldn't let 
a date to have a tooth filled stand in the way of his 
doing his duty to his country. Or the social revo- 
lution might start on Wednesday, and by Thursday 
the whole town might be in ashes. You can picture 
yourself standing, Thursday afternoon at 3.30 on 
the ruins of the City Hall, fighting off marauding 
bands of reds, and saying to yourself, with a sigh 
of relief: " Only to think! At this time I was to 
have been climbing into the dentist's chair! " You 
never can tell when your luck will turn in a thing 
like that. 

But Wednesday goes by and nothing happens. 

[136] 



THE TOOTH AND THE WHOLE TOOTH 

And Thursday morning dawns without even a word 
from the dentist saying that he has been called 
suddenly out of town to lecture before the Incisor 
Club. Apparently, everything is working against 
you. 

By this time, your tongue has taken up a perma- 
nent resting-place in the vacant tooth, and is 
causing you to talk indistinctly and incoherently. 
Somehow you feel that if the dentist opens your 
mouth and finds the tip of your tongue in the tooth, 
he will be deceived and go away without doing 
anything. 

The only thing left is for you to call him up and 
say that you have just killed a man and are being 
arrested and can't possibly keep your appointment. 
But any dentist would see through that. He would 
laugh right into his transmitter at you. There is 
probably no excuse which it would be possible to 
invent which a dentist has not already heard eighty 
or ninety times. No, you might as well see the 
thing through now. 

Luncheon is a ghastly rite. The whole left side 
of your jaw has suddenly developed an acute sensi- 
tiveness and the disaffection has spread to the four 
teeth on either side of the original one. You doubt 
if it will be possible for him to touch it at all. 
Perhaps all he intends to do this time is to look at 

[137] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

it anyway. You might even suggest that to him. 
You could very easily come in again soon and have 
him do the actual work. 

Three-thirty draws near. A horrible time of day 
at best. Just when a man's vitality is lowest. Be- 
fore stepping in out of the sunlight into the 
building in which the dental parlor is, you take one 
look about you at the happy people scurrying by 
in the street. Carefree children that they are! 
What do they know of Life? Probably that man 
in the silly-looking hat never had trouble with so 
much as his baby-teeth. There they go, pushing 
and jostling each other, just as if within ten feet 
of them there was not a man who stands on the 
brink of the Great Misadventure. Ah well! Life 
is like that! 

Into the elevator. The last hope is gone. The 
door clangs and you look hopelessly about you at 
the stupid faces of your fellow passengers. How 
can people be so clownish? Of course, there is 
always the chance that the elevator will fall and 
that you will all be terribly hurt. But that is too 
much to expect. You dismiss it from your thoughts 
as too impractical, too visionary. Things don't 
work out as happily as that in real life. 

You feel a certain glow of heroic pride when you 
tell the operator the right floor number. You might 

[138] 



THE TOOTH AND THE WHOLE TOOTH 

just as easily have told him a floor too high or too 
low, and that would, at least, have caused delay. 
But after all, a man must prove himself a man and 
the least you can do is to meet Fate with an unflinch- 
ing eye and give the right floor number. 

Too often has the scene in the dentist's waiting- 
room been described for me to try to do it again 
here. They are all alike. The antiseptic smell, 
the ominous hum from the operating-rooms, the 1921 
" Literary Digests," and the silent, sullen, group 
of waiting patients, each trying to look unconcerned 
and cordially disliking everyone else in the room, 
— all these have been sung by poets of far greater 
lyric powers than mine. (Not that I really think 
that they are greater than mine, but that's the cus- 
tomary form of excuse for not writing something 
you haven't got time or space to do. As a matter 
of fact, I think I could do it much better than it 
has ever been done before). 

I can only say that, as you sit looking, with 
unseeing eyes, through a large book entitled, " The 
Great War in Pictures," you would gladly change 
places with the most lowly of God's creatures. It 
is inconceivable that there should be anyone worse 
off than you, unless perhaps it is some of the poor 
wretches who are waiting v/ith you. 

That one over in the arm-chair, nervously tearing 

[ 139] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

to shreds a copy of " The Dental Review and Prac- 
tical Inlay Worker." She may have something 
frightful the trouble with her. She couldn't pos- 
sibly look more worried. Perhaps it is very, very 
painful. This thought cheers you up considerably. 
What cowards women are in times like these! 

And then there comes the sound of voices from 
the next room. 

'' All right, Doctor, and if it gives me any more 
pain shall I call you up? ... . Do you think that 
it will bleed much more? .... Saturday morning, 
then, at eleven. . . . Good bye, Doctor." 

And a middle-aged woman emerges (all women 
are middle-aged when emerging from the dentist's 
office) looking as if she were playing the big emo- 
tional scene in " John Ferguson." A wisp of hair 
waves dissolutely across her forehead between her 
eyes. Her face is pale, except for a slight inflam- 
mation at the corners of her mouth, and in her eyes 
is that far-away look of one who has been face to 
face with Life. But she is through. She should 
care how she looks. 

The nurse appears, and looks inquiringly at each 
one in the room. Each one in the room evades the 
nurse's glance in one last, futile attempt to fool 
someone and get away without seeing the dentist. 
But she spots you and nods pleasantly. God, how 

[ 140] 




You would gladly change places with the most lawless of 

God's creatures. 



THE TOOTH AND THE WHOLE TOOTH 

pleasantly she nods! There ought to be a law 
against people being as pleasant as that. 

" The doctor will see you now," she says. 

The English language may hold a more disagree- 
able combination of words than '' The doctor will 
see you now." I am willing to concede some- 
thing to the phrase "Have you anything to say 
before the current is turned on." That may be 
worse for the moment, but it doesn't last so long. 
For continued, unmitigating depression, I know 
nothing to equal " The doctor will see you now." 
But I'm not narrow-minded about it. I'm willing 
to consider other possibilities. 

Smiling feebly, you trip over the extended feet 
of the man next to you, and stagger into the 
delivery-room, where, amid a ghastly array of 
death-masks of teeth, blue flames waving eerOy 
from Bunsen burners, and the drowning sound of 
perpetually running water which chokes and gurgles 
at intervals, you sink into the chair and close your 
eyes. 

• ••••• 

But now let us consider the spiritual exaltation 
that comes when you are at last let down and turned 
loose. It is all over, and what did it amount to? 
Why, nothing at all. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Noth- 
ing at all. 

[141] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

You suddenly develop a particular friendship for 
the dentist. A splendid fellow, really. You ask 
him questions about his instruments. What does 
he use this thing for, for instance? Well, well, to 
think of a little thing like that making all that 
trouble. A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha ! . . . And the dentist's 
family, how are they? Isn't that fine! 

Gaily you shake hands with him and straighten 
your tie. Forgotten is the fact that you have an- 
other appointment with him for Monday. There 
is no such thing as Monday. You are through for 
today, and all's right with the world. 

As you pass out through the waiting-room, you 
leer at the others unpleasantly. The poor fishes! 
Why can't they take their medicine like grown 
people and not sit there moping as if they were 
going to be shot? 

Heigh-ho! Here's the elevator-man! A charm- 
ing fellow! You wonder if he knows that you have 
just had a tooth filled. You feel tempted to tell 
him and slap him on the back. You feel tempted 
to tell everyone out in the bright, cheer\^ street. 
And what a wonderful street it is too! All full of 
nice, black snow and water. After all, Life is sweet! 

And then you go and find the first person whom 
you can accost without being arrested and explain 
to him just what it was that the dentist did to you, 

[ 142 ] 



THE TOOTH AND THE WHOLE TOOTH 

and how you felt, and what you have got to have 
done next time. 

Which brings us right back to where we were 
in the beginning, and perhaps accounts for every- 
one's liking to divulge their dental secrets to others. 
It may be a sort of hysterical relief that, for the 
time being, it is all over with. 



[1431 



XXVIII 
MALIGNANT MIRRORS 

AS a rule, I try not to look into mirrors any 
more than is absolutely necessary. Things 
are depressing enough as they are without my going 
out of my way to make myself miserable. 

But every once in a while it is unavoidable. 
There are certain mirrors in town with which I 
am brought face to face on occasion and there is 
nothing to do but make the best of it. I have 
come to classify them according to the harshness 
with which they fling the truth into my face. 

I am unquestionably at my worst in the mirror 
before which I try on hats. I may have been going 
along all winter thinking of other things, dwelling 
on what people tell me is really a splendid spiritual 
side to my nature, thinking of myself as rather a 
fine sort of person, not dashing perhaps, but one 
from whose countenance shines a great light of 
honesty and courage which is even more to be 
desired than physical beauty. I rather imagine that 
little children on the street and grizzled Supreme 

[ 144] 



MALIGNANT MIRRORS 

Court justices out for a walk turn as I pass and 
say " A fine face. Plain, but fine." 

Then I go in to buy a hat. The mirror in the 
hat store is triplicate, so that you see yourself not 
only head-on but from each side. The appearance 
that I present to myself in this mirror is that of 
three police-department photographs showing all 
possible approaches to the face of Harry DuChamps, 
alias Harry Duval, alias Harry Duffy, wanted in 
Rochester for the murder of Nettie Lubitch, age 5. 
All that is missing is the longitudinal scar across 
the right cheek. 

I have never seen a meaner face than mine is in 
the hat-store mirror. I could stand its not being 
handsome. I could even stand looking weak in an 
attractive, man-about-town sort of way. But in 
the right hand mirror there confronts me a hang- 
dog face, the face of a yellow craven, while at the 
left leers an even more repulsive type, sensual and 
cruel. 

Furthermore, even though I have had a hair-cut 
that very day, there is an unkempt fringe showing 
over my collar in back and the collar itself, (a 
Wimpet, 1 4 J, which looked so well on the young 
man in the car-card) seems to be something that 
would be worn by a Maine guide when he goes into 
Portland for the day. My suit needs pressing and 

[145] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

there is a general air of its having been given to 
me, with ten dollars, by the State on my departure 
from Sing Sing the day before. 

But for an unfavorable full-length view, nothing 
can compare with the one that I get of myself as 
I pass the shoe-store on the corner. They have a 
mirror in the window, so set that it catches the re- 
flection of people as they step up on the curb. When 
there are other forms in the picture it is not always 
easy to identify yourself at first, especially at a 
distance, and every morning on my way to work, 
unless I deliberately avert my face, I am mortified 
to discover that the unpleasant-looking man, with 
the rather effeminate, swinging gait, whom I see 
mincing along through the crowd, is none other than 
myself. 

The only good mirror in the list is the one in the 
elevator of my clothing-store. There is a subdued 
light in the car, a sort of golden glow which softens 
and idealizes, and the mirror shows only a two-thirds 
length, making it impossible to see how badly the 
cuffs on my trousers bag over the tops of my shoes. 
Here I become myself again. I have even thought 
that I might be handsome if I paid as much attention 
to my looks as some men do. In this mirror, my 
clothes look (for the last time) as similar clothes 
look on well-dressed men. A hat which is in every 

[146] 




I am mortified to discover that the unpleasant looking man 
is none other than myself. 



MALIGNANT MIRRORS 

respect perfect when seen here, immediately be- 
comes a senatorial sombrero when I step out into 
the street, but for the brief space of time while I am 
in that elevator, I am the distingue, clean-cut, 
splendid figure of a man that the original blue-prints 
called for. I wonder if it takes much experience 
to run an elevator, for if it doesn't, I v/ould like to 
make my life-work running that car with the magic 
mirror. 



[147] 



XXIX 

THE POWER OF THE PRESS 

THE Police Commissioner of New York City 
explains the wave of crime in that city by 
blaming the newspapers. The newspapers, he says, 
are constantly printing accounts of robberies and 
murders, and these accounts simply encourage other 
criminals to come to New York and do the same. 
If the papers would stop giving all this publicity to 
crime, the crooks might forget that there was such 
a thing. As it is, they read about it in their news- 
papers every morning, and sooner or later have to 
go out and try it for themselves. 

This is a terrible thought, but suggests a con- 
venient alibi for other errant citizens. Thus we 
may read the following nev^s notes: 

Benjamin W. Gleam, age forty-two, of 1946 
Ruby Avenue, The Bronx, was arrested last night 
for appearing in the Late Byzantine Room of the 
Museum of Fine Arts clad only in a suit of medium- 
weight underwear. When questioned Gleam said 
that he had seen so many pictures in tlie newspaper 
advertisements of respectable men and women going 

[148] 



THE POWER OF THE PRESS 

about in their underwear, drinking tea, jumping 
hurdles and holding family reunions, that he simply 
couldn't stand it any longer, and had to try it for 
himself. 'The newspapers did it," he is quoted as 
saying. 

Mrs. Leonia M. Eggcup, who was arrested yester- 
day on the charge of bigamy, issued a statement 
today through her attorneys. Wine, Women and 
Song. 

" I am charged with having eleven husbands, all 
living in various parts of the United States," reads 
the statement. " This charge is correct. But be- 
fore I pay the extreme penalty, I want to have the 
public understand that I am not to blame. It is 
the fault of the press of this country. Day after 
day I read the list of marriages in my morning 
paper. Day after day I saw people after people 
getting married. Finally the thing got into my 
blood, and although I was married at the time, I 
felt that I simply had to be married again. Then, 
no sooner would I become settled in my new home, 
than the constant incitement to further matrimonial 
ventures would come through the columns of the 
daily press. I fell, it is true, but if there is any 
justice in this land, it will be the newspapers and 
not I who will suffer." 

[149] 



XXX 

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 

AS a pretty tribute to that element of our popu- 
lation which is under twenty-two years of age^ 
these are called " the Holidays." 

This is the only chance that the janitors of the 
schools and colleges have to soak the floors of the 
recitation halls with oil to catch the dust of the next 
semester, and while this is being done there is noth- 
ing to do with the students but to send them home 
for a week or two. Thus it happened that the 
term '' holidays " is applied to that period of the 
year when everybody else is working just twice as 
hard and twice as long during the week to make up 
for that precious day which must be lost to the Sales 
Campaign or the Record Output on Christmas Day. 

For those who are home from school and college 
it is called, in the catalogues of their institutions, 
a '^ recess " or " vacation," and the general impres- 
sion is allowed to get abroad among the parents 
that it is to be a period of rest and recuperation. 
Arthur and Alice have been working so hard at 
school or college that two weeks of good quiet home- 

[150] 



HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 

life and home cooking will put them right on their 
feet again, ready to pitch into that chemistry course 
in which, owing to an incompetent instructor, they 
did not do very well last term. 

That the theory of rest during vacation is falla- 
cious can be proved by hiding in the coat closet of 
the home of any college or school youth home for 
Christmas recess. Admission to the coat closet may 
be forced by making yourself out to be a govern- 
ment official or an inspector of gas meters. Once 
hidden among the overshoes, you will overhear the 
following little earnest drama, entitled ^' Home for 
the Holidays." 

There was a banging of the front door, and Edgar 
has arrived. A round of kisses, an exchange of 
health reports, and Edgar is bounding upstairs. 

" Dinner in half an hour," says Mother. 

^' Sorry," shouts Edgar from the bath-tub, " but 
I've got to go out to the Whortleberry's to a dinner 
dance. Got the bid last week. Say, have I got any 
dress-studs at home here? Mine are in my trunk." 

Father's studs are requisitioned and the family 
cluster at Edgar's door to slide in a few conversa- 
tional phrases while he is getting the best of his 
dress shirt. 

" How have you been? " (Three guesses as to 
who it is that asks this.) 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

*' Oh, all right. Say^ have I got any pumps at 
home? Mine are in the trunk. Where are those 
old ones I had last summer? " 

'' Don't you want me to tie your tie for you? " 
(Two guesses as to who it is that asks this.) 

^' No, thanks. Can I get my laundry done by 
tomorrow night? I've got to go out to the Clamps' 
at Short Neck for over the week-end to a bob- 
sledding party, and when I get back from there 
Mrs. Dibble is giving a dinner and theatre party.'' 

" Don't you want to eat a little dinner here be- 
fore you go to the Whortleberry's? " (One guess 
as to who it is that asks this.) 

But Edgar has bounded down the stairs and left 
the Family to comfort each other with such observa- 
tions as " He looks tired," " I think that he has 
filled out a little," or " I wonder if he's studying 
too hard." 

You might stay in the coat-closet for the entire 
two weeks and not hear much more of Edgar than 
this. His parents don't. They catch him as he is 
going up and down stairs and while he is putting 
the studs into his shirt, and are thankful for that. 
They really get into closer touch with him while 
he is at college, for he writes them a weekly letter 
then. 

Nerve-racking as this sort of life is to the youth 

[152] 



HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 

who is supposed to be resting during his vacation, 
it might be even more wearing if he were to stay 
within the Family precincts. Once in a while one 
of the parties for which he has been signed up falls 
through, and he is forced to spend the evening at 
home. At first it is somewhat embarrassing to be 
thrown in with strangers for a meal like that, but, 
as the evening wears on, the ice is broken and 
things assume a more easy swing. The Family be- 
gins to make remarks. 

" You must stand up straighter, my boy," says 
Father, placing his hand between Edgar's shoulder- 
blades. " You are slouching badly. I noticed it as 
you walked down the street this morning." 

" Do all the boys wear soft-collared shirts like 
that? " asks Mother. " Personally, I think that they 
look very untidy. They are all right for tennis 
and things like that, but I wish you'd put on a 
starched collar when you are in the house. You 
never see Elmer Quiggly wearing a collar like that. 
He always looks neat." 

" For heaven's sake, Eddie," says Sister, " take 
off that tie. You certainly do get the most terrific- 
looking things to put around your neck. It looks 
like a Masonic apron. Let me go with you when 
you buy your next batch." 

By this time Edgar has his back against the wall 

[153] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

and is breathing hard. What do these folks know 
of what is being done? 

If it is not family heckling it may be that even 
more insidious trial, the third degree. This is usu- 
ally inflicted by semi-relatives and neighbors. The 
formulae are something like this: 

" Well, how do you like your school? " 

" I suppose you have plenty of time for pranks, 
eh?" 

" What a good time you boys must have! It isn't 
so much what you get out of books that will help 
you in after life, I have found, but the friendships 
made in college. Meeting so man}^ boys from all 
parts of the country — why, it's a liberal education 
in itself." 

" Whsit was the matter with the football team 
this season? " 

" Let's see, how many more years have you? 
What, only one more! Well, well, and I can re- 
member you when you were that high, and used to 
come over to my house wearing a little green dress, 
with big mother-of-pearl buttons. You certainly 
were a cute little boy, and used to call our cook 
' Sna-sna.' And here you are, almost a senior." 

" Oh, are you 1924? I wonder if you know a 
fellow named — er — Mellish — Spencer Mellish? 
I met him at the beach last summer. I am pretty 

[IS4] 




I can remember you when you were that high." 



HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 

sure that he is in your class — well, no, maybe it 
was 1918.'^ 

After an hour or two of this Edgar is willing to 
go back to college and take an extra course in Black- 
smithing, Chipping and Filing, given during the 
Christmas vacation, rather than run the risk of get- 
ting caught again. And, whichever way you look 
at it, whether he spends his time getting into and 
out of his evening clothes, or goes crazy answering 
questions and defending his mode of dress, it all 
adds up to the same in the end — fatigue and de- 
pletion and what the doctor would call '' a general 
run-down nervous condition." 

The younger you are the more frayed you get. 
Little Wilbur comes home from school, where he 
has been put to bed at 8:30 every night with the 
rest of the fifth form boys, and has had to brush 
his hair in the presence of the head-master's wife, 
and dives into what might be called a veritable 
maelstrom of activity. From a diet of cereal and 
fruit-whips, he is turned loose in the butler's pantry 
among the maraschino cherries and given a free rein 
at the various children's parties, where individual 
pound-cake Santas and brandied walnuts are fol- 
lowed by an afternoon at " Treasure Island," with 
the result that he comes home and insists on tipping 

[155] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

every one in the family the black spot and breaks 
the cheval glass when he is denied going to the six- 
day bicycle race at two in the morning. 

Little girls do practically the same, and, if they 
are over fourteen, go back to school with the added 
burden of an affaire de coeur contracted during the 
recess. In general, it takes about a month or two 
of good, hard schooling and overstudy to put the 
child back on its feet after the Christmas rest at 
home. 

Which leads us to the conclusion that our edu- 
cational system is all wrong. It is obvious that the 
child should be kept at home for eight months out 
of the year and sent to school for the vacations. 



[156] 



XXXI 

HOW TO UNDERSTAND 
INTERNATIONAL FINANCE 

IT is high time that someone came out with a 
clear statement of the international financial 
situation. For weeks and weeks officials have been 
rushing about holding conferences and councils and 
having their pictures taken going up and down the 
steps of buildings. Then, after each conference, 
the newspapers have printed a lot of figures show- 
ing the latest returns on how much Germany owes 
the bank. And none of it means anything. 

Now there is a certain principle which has to 
be followed in all financial discussions involving 
sums over one hundred dollars. There is probably 
not more than one hundred dollars in actual cash in 
circulation today. That is, if you were to call in 
all the bills and silver and gold in the country at 
noon tomorrow and pile them up on the table, you 
would find that you had just about one hundred 
dollars, with perhaps several Canadian pennies and 
a few peppermint life-savers. All the rest of the 
money you hear about doesn't exist. It is con- 

[157] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

versation-money. When you hear of a transaction 
involving $50,000,000 it means that one firm wrote 
" 50,000,000 '^ on a piece of paper and gave it to 
another firm, and the other firm took it home and 
said "Look, Momma, I got $50,000,000! " But 
when Momma asked for a dollar and a quarter out 
of it to pay the man who washed the windows, the 
answer probably was that the firm hadn't got rnore 
than seventy cents in cash. 

This is the principle of finance. So long as you 
can pronounce any number above a thousand, you 
have got that much money. You can't work this 
scheme with the shoe-store man or the restaurant- 
owner, but it goes big on Wall St. or in international 
financial circles. 

This much understood, we see that when the 
Allies demand 132,000,000,000 gold marks from 
Germany they know very well that nobody in Ger- 
many has ever seen 132,000,000,000 gold marks 
and never will. A more surprised and disappointed 
lot of boys you couldn't ask to see than the Supreme 
Financial Council would be if Germany were actu- 
ally to send them a money-order for the full amount 
demanded. 

What they mean is that, taken all in all, Germany 
owes the world 132,000,000,000 gold marks plus 
carfare. This includes everything, breakage, meals 

[158] 



INTERNATIONAL FINANCE 

sent to room, good will, everything. Now, it is un- 
derstood that if they really meant this, Germany 
couldn't even draw cards; so the principle on which 
the thing is figured out is as follows: (Watch this 
closely; there is a trick in it). 

You put down a lot of figures, like this. Any 
figures will do, so long as you can't read them 
quickly: 

, 132,000,000,000 gold marks 
$33,000,000,000 on a current value basis 
$21,000,000,000 on reparation account plus 12^% 
yearly tax on German exports 
11,000,000,000 gold fish 
$1.35 amusement tax 
866,000 miles. Diameter of the sun 

2,000,000,000 
27,000,000,000 
31,000,000,000 

Then you add them together and subtract the 
number you first thought of. This leaves 11. And 
the card you hold in your hand is the seven of dia- 
monds. Am I right? 



[159] 



XXXII 

TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE SUMMER 

(An Imaginary Watch-Night with the Weather 

Man) 

IT was II o'clock on the night of June 20. We 
were seated in the office of the Weather Bureau 
on the twenty-ninth floor of the Whitehall Build- 
ing, the Weather Man and I, and we were waiting 
for summer to come. It was officially due on 
June 21. We had the almanac's word for it and 
years and years of precedent, but still the Weather 
Man was skeptical. 

It had been a hard spring for the Weather Man. 
Day after day he had been forced to run a signed 
statement in the daily papers to the effect that some 
time during that day there would probably be 
showers. And day after day, with a ghastly con- 
sistency, his prophecy had come true. People had 
come to dislike him personally; old jokes about 
him were brought out and oiled and given a trial 
spin down the road a piece before appearing in 
funny columns and vaudeville skits, and the sport- 

[160] 



'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE SUMMER 

ing writers, frenzied by the task of filling their 
space with nothing but tables of batting averages, 
had become positively libellous. 

And now summer was at hand, and with it the 
promise of the sun. The Weather Man nibbled 
at his thumb nail. The clock on the wall said 

ii:i5- 

" It just couldn't go back on us now," he said, 

plaintively, " when it means so much to us. It 
always has come on the 21st." 

There was not much that I could say. I didn't 
want to hold out any false hope, for I am a child 
in arms in matters of astronomy, or whatever it is 
that makes weather. 

" I often remember hearing my father tell," I 
ventured, "how every year on the 21st of June 
summer always used to come, rain or shine, until 
they came to look for it on that date, and to count 
from then as the beginning of the season. It seems 
as if" 

" I know," he interrupted, " but there have been 
so many upsetting things during the past twelve 
months. We can't check up this year by any other 
years. All we can do is wait and see." 

A gust of wind from Jersey ran along the side 
of the building, shaking at the windows. The 
Weather Man shuddered, and looked out of the 

[161] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

corner of his eye at the anemometer-register which 
stood on a table in the middle of the room. It 
indicated whatever anemometers do indicate when 
they want to register bad news. I considerately 
looked out at the window. 

" You've no idea/' he said at last, in a low voice, 
" of how this last rainy spell has affected my home 
life. For the first tv/o or three days, although I 
got dark looks from sHght acquaintances, there 
was always a cheery welcome waiting for me when 
I got home, and the Little Woman would say, 
* Never mind, Ray, it will soon be pleasant, and 
we all know that it's not your fault, anyway.* 

" But then, after a week had passed and there 
had been nothing but rain and showers and rain, 
I began to notice a change. When I would swing 
in at the gate she would meet me and say, in a 
far-away voice, ' Well, what is it for to-morrow? ' 
And I would have to say ' Probably cloudy, with 
occasional showers and light easterly gales.' At 
which she would turn away and bite her lip, and 
once I thought I saw her eye-lashes wet. 

" Then, one night, the break came. It had 
started out to be a perfect day, just such as one 
reads about, but along about noon it began to cloud 
over and soon the rain poured down in rain-gauges- 
full. 

[162] 




She would turn away and bite her lip. 



TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE SUMMER 

" I was all discouraged, and as I wrote out the 
forecast for the papers, ^ Rain to-morrow and 
Friday,' I felt like giving the whole thing up and 
going back to Vermont to live. 

'' When I got home, Alice was there with her 
things on, waiting for me. 

" ^ You needn't tell me what it's going to be 
to-morrow,' she sobbed. ^ I know. Every one 
knows. The whole world knows. I used to think 
that it wasn't your fault, but when the children 
come home from school crying because they have 
been plagued for being the Weather Man's chil- 
dren, when every time I go out I know that the 
neighbors are talking behind my back and saying 
" How does she stand it? " when every paper I 
read, every bulletin I see, stares me in the face 
with great letters saying, " Weather Man predicts 
more rain," or "' Lynch the Weather Man and let 
the baseball season go on," then I think it is time 
for us to come to an understanding. I am going 
over to mother's until you can do better.' " 

The Weather Man got up and went to the win- 
dow. Out there over the Battery there was a spot 
casting a sickly glow through the cloud-banks 
which filled the sky. 

" That's the moon up there behind the fog," he 
said, and laughed a bitter cackle. 

[163] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

It was now ii:45- The thermograph was writing 
busily in red ink on the little diagrammed cuff 
provided for that purpose, writing all about the 
temperature. The Weather Man inspected the fine, 
jagged line as it leaked out of the pen on the chart. 
Then he walked over to the window again and 
stood looking out over the bay. 

'' You'd think that people would have a little 
gratitude," he said in a low voice, " and not hit at 
a man who has done so much for them. If it 
weren't for me where would the art of American 
conversation be to-day? If there were no weather 
to talk about, how could there be any dinner parties 
or church sociables or sidewalk chats? 

"All I have to do is put out a real scorcher or 
a continued cold snap, and I can drive off the 
boards the biggest news story that was ever launched 
or draw the teeth out of the most delicate inter- 
national situation. 

'^ I have saved more reputations and social 
functions than any other influence in American 
life, and yet here, when the home office sends me a 
rummy lot of weather, over which I have no con- 
trol, everybody jumps on me." 

He pulled savagely at the window shade and 
pressed his nose against the pane in silence for a 
while. 

[164] 



'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE SUMMER 

There was no sound but the ticking of the 
anemometer and the steady scratching of the ther- 
mograph. I looked at the clock. 11:47. 

Suddenly the telegraph over in the corner 
snapped like a bunch of firecrackers. In a second 
the Weather Man was at its side, taking down the 
message: 

" NEW ORLEANS, LA NHRUFKYOTLDMR- 
ELPWZWOTUDK HEAVY PRECIPITATION 
SOUTH WESTERLY GALES LETTER FOL- 
LOWS 

NEW ORLEANS U S WEATHER BUREAU 

" Poor fellow," muttered the Weather Man, who 
even in his own tense excitement did not forget the 
troubles of his brother weather prophet in New 
Orleans, " I know just how he feels. I hope he's 
not married." 

He glanced at the clock. It was 11:56. In four 
minutes summer would be due, and with summer 
a clearer sky, renewed friendships and a united 
family for the Weather Man. If it failed him — I 
dreaded to think of what might happen. It was 
twenty-nine floors to the pavement below, and I 
am not a powerful man physically. 

Together we sat at the table by the thermograph 
and watched the red line draw mountain ranges 

[165] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

along the 50 degree line. From our seats we could 
look out over the Statue of Liberty and see the 
cloud-dimmed glow which told of a censored moon. 
The Weather Man was making nervous little pokes 
at his collar, as if it had a rough edge that was 
cutting his neck. 

Suddenly he gripped the table. Somewhere a 
clock was beginning to strike twelve. I shut my 
eyes and waited. 

Ten-eleven- twelve ! 

" Look, Newspaper Man, look! " he shrieked and 
grabbed me by the tie. 

I opened my eyes and looked at the thermograph. 
At the last stroke of the clock the red line had given 
a little, final quaver on the 50 degree line and then 
had shot up like a rocket until it struck 72 degrees 
and lay there trembling and heaving like a runner 
after a race. 

But it was not at this that the Weather Man 
was pointing. There, out in the murky sky, the 
stroke of twelve had ripped apart the clouds and 
a large, milk-fed moon was fairly crashing its way 
through, laying out a straight-away course of silver 
cinders across the harbor, and in all parts of the 
heavens stars were breaking out like a rash. In 
two minutes it had become a balmy, languorous 
night. Summer had come! 



*o 



[166] 



TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE SUMMER 

I turned to the Weather Man. He was wiping 
the palms of his hands on his hips and looking 
foolishly happy. I said nothing. There was 
nothing that could be said. 

Before we left the office he stopped to write out 
the prophecy for Wednesday, June 2 1 , the First Day 
of Summer. " Fair and warmer, with slowly rising 
temperatur." His hand trembled so as he wrote 
that he forgot the final '' e ". Then we went out and 
he turned toward his home. 

On Wednesday, June 21, it rained. 



[167] 



XXXIII 
WELCOME HOME — AND SHUT UP! 

THERE are a few weeks which bid fair to be 
pretty trying ones in our national life. They 
will mark the return to the city of thousands and 
thousands of vacationists after two months or two 
weeks of feverish recuperation and there is probably 
no more obnoxious class of citizen, taken end for 
end, than the returning vacationist. 

In the first place, they are all so offensively 
healthy. They come crashing through the train- 
shed, all brown and peeling, as if their health were 
something they had acquired through some partic- 
ular credit to themselves. If it were possible, some 
of them would wear their sun-burned noses on their 
watch-chains, like Phi Beta Kappa keys. 

They have got so used to going about all summer 
in bathing suits and shirts open at the neck that 
they look like professional wrestlers in stiff collars 
and seem to be on the point of bursting out at any 
minute. And they always make a great deal of 
noise getting off the train. 

" Where's Bessie? " they scream, '' Ned, where's 

[i68] 



WELCOME HOME — AND SHUT UP! 

Bessie? . . . Have you got the thermos bottles? 
. . . Well, here's the old station just as it was when 
we left it (hysterical laughter). . . . Wallace, you 
simply must carry your pail and shovel. Mamma 
can't carry everything, you know. . . . Mamma 
told you that if you wanted to bring your pail and 
shovel home you would have to carry it yourself, 
don't you remember Mamma told you that, Wal- 
lace? . . . Wallace, listen! . . . Edna, have you 
got Bessie? . . . Harry's gone after the trunks. 
... At least, he said that was where he was going. 
. . . Look, there's the Dexter Building, looking 
just the same. Big as life and twice as natural. . . . 
I know, Wallace, Mamma's just as hot as you are. 
But you don't hear Mamma crying do you? ... I 
wonder where Bert is. . . . He said he'd be down 
to meet us sure. . . . Here, give me that cape, Lil- 
lian. . . . You're dragging it all over the ground. 
. . . Here's Bert! . . . Whoo-hoo, Bert! . . . 
Here we are! . . . Spencer, there's Daddy! . . . 
Whoo-hoo, Daddy! . . . Junior, wipe that gum off 
your shoe this minute. . . . Where's Bessie? " 

And so they go, all the way out into the street 
and the cab and home, millions of them. It's 
terrible. 

And when they get home things are just about as 
bad, except there aren't so many people to see them. 

[169] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

At the sight of eight Sunday and sixty-two daily pa- 
pers strewn over the front porch and lawn, there are 
loud screams of imprecation at Daddy for having 
forgotten to order them stopped. Daddy insists 
that he did order them stopped and that it is that 
damn fool boy. 

^' I guess you weren't home much during July, " 
says Mamma bitterly, '' or you would have noticed 
that something was wrong." (Daddy didn't join 
the family until August.) 

^' There were no papers delivered during 
July," says Daddy very firmly and quietly, 
" at least, I didn't see any." (Stepping on one 
dated July 19.) 

The inside of the house resembles some place 
you might bet a man a hundred dollars he daren't 
spend the night in. Dead men's feet seem to be 
protruding from behind sofas and there is a damp 
smell as if the rooms had been closed pending the 
arrival of the coroner. 

Junior runs upstairs to see if his switching engine 
is where he left it and comes falling down stairs 
panting with terror announcing that there is Some- 
thing in the guest-room. At that moment there is 
a sound of someone leaving the house by the back 
door. Daddy is elected by popular vote to go up- 
stairs and see what has happened, although he in- 

[170] 



WELCOME HOME — AND SHUT UP! 

sists that he has to wait down stairs as the man with 
the trunks will be there at any minute. After five 
minutes of cagey manoeuvering around in the hall 
outside the guest-room door, he returns looking for 
Junior, saying that it was simply a pile of things 
left on the bed covered with a sheet. " Aha-ha-ha- 
ha-ha! '' 

Then comes the unpacking. It has been esti- 
mated that in the trunks of returning vacationists, 
taking this section of the country as a whole, the 
following articles will be pulled out during the next 
few weeks: 

Sneakers, full of sand. 

Bathing suits, still damp from the "one last 
swim." 

Dead tennis balls. 

Last month^s magazines, bought for reading in the 
grove. 

Shells and pretty stones picked up on the beach 
for decoration purposes, for which there has sud- 
denly become no use at all. 

Horse-shoe crabs, salvaged by children who re- 
fused to leave them behind. 

Lace scarfs and shawls, bought from itinerant 
Armenians. 

Remnants of tubes formerly containing sunburn 

[171] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

ointment, half-filled "bottles of citronella and white 
shoe-dressing. 

White flannel trousers, ready for the cleaners. 

Snap-shots, showing Ed and Mollie on the beach 
in their bathing suits. 

Snap-shots which show nothing at all. 

Faded flowers, dance-cards and assorted senti- 
mental objects, calculated to bring up tender memo- 
ries of summer evenings. 

Uncompleted knit-sweaters. 

Then begins the tour of the neighborhood, com- 
paring summer-vacation experiences. To each re- 
turning vacationist it seems as if everyone in town 
must be interested in what he or she did during the 
summer. They stop perfect strangers on the streets 
and say: '' Well, a week ago today at this time we 
were all walking up to the Post-Office for the mail. 
Right out in front of the Post-Office w^ere the fish- 
houses and you ought to have seen Billy one night 
leading a lobster home on a string. That was the 
night we all went swimming by moon-light." 

'' Yeah? " says the stranger, and pushes his way 
past. 

Then two people get together who have been to 
different places. Neither wants to hear about the 
other's summer — and neither does. Both talk at 

[172 ] 



WELCOME HOME — AND SHUT UP! 

once and pull snap-shots out of their pockets. 

" Here's where we used to take our lunch — '* 

"That's nothing. Steve had a friend up the lake 
who had a launch — " 

" — and everyday there was something doing over 
at the Casino — " 

" -— and you ought to have seen Miriam, she was 
a sight — " 

Pretty soon they come to blows trying to make 
each other listen. The only trouble is they never 
quite kill each other. If only one could be killed 
it would be a great help. 

The next ban on immigration should be on re- 
turning vacationists. Have government officials 
stationed in each city and keep everyone out who 
won't give a bond to shut up and go right to work. 



[173] 



XXXIV 

ANIMAL STORIES 

I 

How Georgie Dog Gets the Rubbers on the Guest 

Room Bed 

OLD Mother Nature gathered all her little 
pupils about her for the daily lesson in *' How 
the Animals Do the Things They Do." Every day 
Waldo Lizard, Edna Elephant and Lawrence 
Walrus came to Mother Nature's school, and there 
learned all about the useless feats performed by 
their brother and sister animals. 

" Today,'' said Mother Nature, " we shall find 
out how it is that Georgie Dog manages to get the 
muddy rubbers from the hall closet, up the stairs, 
and onto the nice white bedspread in the guest 
room. You must be sure to listen carefully and 
pay strict attention to what Georgie Dog says. 
Only, don't take too much of it seriously, for 
Georgie is an awful liar." 

And, sure enough, in came Georgie Dog, wagging 
his entire torso in a paroxysm of camaradarie, al- 

[174] 



ANIMAL STORIES 

though everyone knew that he had no use for Waldo 
Lizard. 

" Tell us, Georgie,'* said Mother Nature, " how 
do you do your clever work of rubber-dragging? 
We would like so much to know. Wouldn't we, 
children? " 

"No, Mother Nature!" came the instant re- 
sponse from the children. 

So Georgie Dog began. 

" Well, I'll tell you; it's this way," he said, snap- 
ping at a fly. " You have to be very niftig about 
it. First of all, I lie by the door of the hall closet 
until I see a nice pair of muddy rubbers kicked 
into it." 

" How muddy ought they to be? " asked Edna 
Elephant, although little enough use she would have 
for the information. 

" I am glad that you asked that question," replied 
Georgie. " Personally, I like to have mud on 
them about the consistency of gurry — that is, not 
too wet — because then it will all drip off on the 
way upstairs, and not so dry that it scrapes off on 
the carpet. For we must save it all for the bed- 
spread, you know. 

" As soon as the rubbers are safely in the hall 
closet, I make a great deal of todo about going 
into the other room, in order to give the impression 

Ins] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

that there is nothing interesting enough in the hall 
to keep me there. A good, loud yawn helps to 
disarm any suspicion of undue excitement. I some- 
times even chew a bit of fringe on the sofa and take 
a scolding for it — anything to draw attention from 
the rubbers. Then, when everyone is at dinner, I 
sneak out and drag them forth.'' 

" And how do you manage to take them both at 
once? " piped up Lawrence Walrus. 

^' I am glad that you asked that question," said 
Georgie, " because I was trying to avoid it. You 
can never guess what the answer is. It is very 
difficult to take two at a time, and so we usually 
have to take one and then go back and get the 
other. I had a cousin once who knew a grip which 
could be worked on the backs of overshoes, by 
means of which he could drag two at a time, but 
he was an exceptionally fine dragger. He once 
took a pair of rubber boots from the barn into the 
front room, where a wedding was taking place, and 
put them on the bride's train. Of course, not one 
dog in a million could hope to do that. 

" Once upstairs, it is quite easy getting them into 
the guest room, unless the door happens to be shut. 
Then what do you think I do? I go around 
through the bathroom window onto the roof, and 
walk around to the sleeping porch, and climb down 

[176] 



ANIMAL STORIES 

into the guest room that way. It is a lot of trouble, 
but I think that you will agree with me that the 
results are worth it. 

" Climbing up on the bed with the rubbers in 
my mouth is difficult, but it doesn't make any dif- 
ference if some of the mud comes off on the side 
of the bedspread. In fact, it all helps in the final 
effect. I usually try to smear them around when 
I get them at last on the spread, and if I can leave 
one of them on the pillow, I feel that it's a pretty 
fine little old world, after all. This done, and I 
am off." 

And Georgie Dog suddenly disappeared in official 
pursuit of an automobile going eighty-five miles an 
hour. 

" So now," said Mother Nature to her little 
pupils, '^ we have heard all about Georgie Dog's 
work. To-morrow we may listen to Lillian Mos- 
quito tell how she makes her voice carry across a 
room." 



[177] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

ANIMAL STORIES 
II 

How Lillian Mosquito Projects Her Voice 

ALL the children came crowding around Mother 
Nature one cold, raw afternoon in summer, 
crying in unison: 

^' Oh, Mother Nature, you promised us that you 
would tell us how Lillian Mosquito projects her 
voice! You promised that you would tell us how 
Lillian Mosquito projects her voice! " 

^'So I did! So I did! '' said Mother Nature, 
laying down an oak, the leaves of which she was 
tipping with scarlet for >the fall trade. " And so I 
will! So I will! " 

At which Waldo Lizard, Edna Elephant and 
Lawrence Walrus jumped with imitation joy, for 
they had hoped to have an afternoon off. 

Mother Nature led them across the fields to the 
piazza of a clubhouse on which there was an ex- 
posed ankle belonging to one of the members. 
There, as she had expected, they found Lillian Mos- 
quito having tea. 

'' Lillian," called Mother Nature, " come off a 
minute. I have some httle friends here who would 
like to know how it is that you manage to hum in 

ri78] 



ANIMAL STORIES 

such a manner as to give the impression of being 
just outside the ear of a person in bed, when 
actually 3^ou are across the room." 

" Will you kindly repeat the question? " said 
Lillian flying over to the railing. 

*' We want to know/^ said Mother Nature, " how 
it is that very often, when you have been fairly 
caught, it turns out that you have escaped without 
injury." 

" I would prefer to answer the question as it 
was first put," said Lillian. 

So Waldo Lizard, Edna Elephant and Lawrence 
Walrus, seeing that there was no way out, cried: 

" Yes, yes, Lillian, do tell us." 

" First of all, you must know," began Lillian 
Mosquito, '' that my chief duty is to annoy. What- 
ever else I do, however many bites I total in the 
course of the evening, I do not consider that I have 
^ made good ' unless I have caused a great deal of 
annoyance while doing it. A bite, quietly executed 
and not discovered by the victim until morning, 
does me no good. It is my duty, and my pleasure, 
to play with him before biting, as you have often 
heard a cat plays with a mouse, tormenting him with 
apprehension and making him struggle to defend 
himself. ... If I am using too long words for you, 
please stop me." 

[179] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

"Stop! " cried Waldo Lizard, reaching for his 
hat, with the idea of possibly getting to the ball 
park by the fifth inning. 

But he was prevented from leaving by kindly old 
Mother Nature, who stepped on him with her kindly 
old heel, and LilHan Mosquito continued: 

" I must therefore, you see, be able to use my 
little voice with great skill. Of course, the first thing 
to do is to make my victim think that I am nearer 
to him than I really am. To do this, I sit quite 
still, let us say, on the footboard of the bed, and, 
beginning to hum in a very, very low tone of voice, 
increase the volume and raise the pitch gradually, 
thereby giving the effect of approaching the pillow. 

" The man in bed thinks that he hears me coming 
toward his head, and I can often see him, waiting 
with clenched teeth until he thinks that I am near 
enough to swat. Sometimes I strike a quick little 
grace-note, as if I were right above him and about 
to make a landing. It is great fun at such times 
to see him suddenly strike himself over the ear 
(they always think that I am right at their ear), 
and then feel carefully between his finger tips to 
see if he has caught me. Then, too, there is always 
the pleasure of thinking that perhaps he has hurt 
himself quite badly by the blow. I have often 
known victims of mine to deafen themselves per- 

[i8o] 



ANIMAL STORIES 

manently by jarring their eardrums in their wild at- 
tempts to catch me." 

'' What fun! What fun! " cried Edna Elephant. 
" I must tr>' it myself just as soon as ever I get 
home." 

" It is often a good plan to make believe that you 
have been caught after one of the swats," continued 
Lillian Mosquito, '' and to keep quiet for a while. 
It makes him cocky. He thinks that he has dem- 
onstrated the superiority of man over the rest of 
the animals. Then he rolls over and starts to sleep. 
This is the time to begin work on him again. After 
he has slapped himself all over the face and head, 
and after he has put on the light and made a search 
of the room and then gone back to bed to think up 
some new words, that is the time when I usually 
bring the climax about. 

" Gradually approaching him from the right, I 
hum loudly at his ear. Then, suddenly becoming 
quiet, I fly silently and quickly around to his neck. 
Just as he hits himself on the ear, I bite his neck 
and fly away. And, voila, there you are! " 

"How true that is! " said Mother Nature. ''Voila, 
there we are ! ' . . . Come, children, let us go now, 
for we must be up bright and early to-morrow to 
learn how Lois Hen scratches up the beets and Swiss 
chard in the gentlemen's gardens." 

[i8i] 



XXXV 

THE TARIFF UNMASKED 

LET us get this tariff thing cleared up, once 
and for all. An explanation is due the Ameri- 
can people, and obviously this is the place to make 
it. 

Viewing the whole thing, schedule by schedule, 
we find it indefensible. In Schedule A alone the 
list of necessities on which the tax is to be raised 
includes Persian berries, extract of nutgalls and 
isinglass. Take isinglass alone. With prices shoot- 
ing up in this market, what is to become of our 
picture post-cards? Where once for a nickel you 
could get a picture of the Woolworth Building 
ablaze with lights with the sun setting and the 
moon rising in the background, under the proposed 
tariff it will easily set you back fifteen cents. This 
is all very well for the rich who can get their picture 
post-cards at wholesale, but how are the poor to get 
their art? 

The only justifiable increase in this schedule 
is on '' blues, in pulp, dried, etc." If this 
will serve to reduce the amount of '' Those 

[182] 



i 
\ 



THE TARIFF UNMASKED 

Lonesome-Onesome-Wonesome Blues " and " IVe 
Got the Left-All-Alone-in-The-Magazine-Reading- 
Room-of-the-Public-Library Blues '' with which our 
popular song market has been flooded for the past 
five years, we could almost bring ourselves to vote 
for the entire tariff bill as it stands. 

Schedule B 

Here we find a tremendous increase in the tax 
on grindstones. Householders and travelers in gen- 
eral do not appreciate what this means. It means 
that, next year, when you are returning from Europe, 
you will have to pay a duty on those Dutch grind- 
stones that you always bring back to the cousins, a 
duty which will make the importation of more 
than three prohibitive. This will lead to an orgy of 
grindstone smuggling, making it necessary for hith- 
erto respectable people to become law-breakers by 
concealing grindstones about their clothing and in 
the trays of their trunks. Think this over. 

Schedule C 

Right at the start of this list we find charcoal 
bars being boosted. Have our children no rights? 
What is a train-ride with children without Hershey's 
charcoal bars? Or gypsum? What more pictur- 
esque on a ride through the country-side than a 

[183] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

band of gypsum encamped by the road with their 
bright colors and gay tambourine playing? Are 
these simple folk to be kept out of this country 
simply because a Republican tariff insists on raising 
the tax on gypsum? 

Schedule D 

A way to evade the injustice of this schedule is 
in the matter of marble slabs. ^' Marble slabs, 
rubbed '^ are going to cost more to import than 
" marble slabs, unrubbed." What we are planning 
to do in this office is to get in a quantity of un- 
rubbed marble slabs and then rub them ourselves. 
A coarse, dry towel is very good for rubbing, they 
say. 

Any further discussion of the details of this iniq- 
uitous tariff would only enrage us to a point of in- 
coherence. Perhaps a short list of some of the 
things you will have to do without under the new 
arrangement will serve to enrage you also: 

Senegal gum, buchu leaves, lava tips for burners, 
magic lantern strips, spiegeleisen nut washers, 
butchers* skewers and gun wads. 

Now write to your congressman! 



[184] 



LITERARY DEPARTMENT 



XXXVI 

"TAKE ALONG A BOOK'' 

THERE seems to be a concerted effort, mani- 
fest in the " Take Along a Book " drive, to 
induce vacationists to slip at least one volume into 
the trunk before getting Daddy to jump on it. 

This is a fine idea, for there is always a space be- 
tween the end of the tennis-racquet and the box of 
soap in which the shoe-whitening is liable to tip 
over unless you jam a book in with it. Any book 
will do. 

It is usually a book that you have been meaning 
to read all Spring, one that you have got so used to 
lying about to people who have asked you if you 
have read it that you have almost kidded yourself 
into believing that you really have read it. You 
picture yourself out in the hammock or down on the 
rocks, with a pillow under your head and pipe or 
a box of candy near at hand, just devouring page 
after page of it. The only thing that worries you 
is what you will read when you have finished that. 
" Oh, well," you think, '' there will probably be 
some books in the town library. Maybe I can get 

[187] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Gibbon there. This summer will be a good time to 
read Gibbon through. '^ 

Your trunk doesn't reach the cottage until four 
days after you arrive, owing to the ferry-pilots' 
strike. You don't get it unpacked down as far as 
the layer in which the book is until you have been 
there a week. 

Then the book is taken out and put on the table. 
In transit it has tried to eat its way through a pair 
of tramping-boots, with the result that one corner 
and the first twenty pages have become dog-eared, 
but that won't interfere with its being read. 

Several other things do interfere, however. The 
nice weather, for instance. You start out from your 
room in the morning and somehow or other never 
get back to it except when you are in a hurry to get 
ready for meals or for bed. You try to read in bed 
one night, but you can't seem to fix your sunburned 
shoulders in a comfortable position. 

You take the book down to luncheon and leave 
it at the table. And you don't miss it for three 
days. When you find it again it has large blisters 
on page 35 where some water was dropped on it. 

Then Mrs. Beatty, who lives in Montclair in the 
winter time (no matter where you go for the sum- 
mer, you always meet some people who live in Mont- 
clair in the winter), borrows the book, as she has 

[188] 



" TAKE ALONG A BOOK " 

heard so much about it. Two weeks later she brings 
it back, and explains that Prince got hold of it one 
afternoon and chewed just a little of the back off, 
but says that she doesn't think it will be noticed 
when the book is in the bookcase. 

Back to the table in the bedroom it goes and is 
used to keep unanswered post-cards in. It also is 
convenient as a backing for cards which you your- 
self are writing. And the flyleaf makes an excel- 
lent place for a bridge-score if there isn't any other 
paper handy. 

When it comes time to pack up for home, you 
shake the sand from among the leaves and save out 
the book to be read on the train. And you leave it 
in the automobile that takes you to the station. 

But for all that, " take along a book." It might 
rain all summer. 



[189] 



XXXVII 

CONFESSIONS OF A CHESS 
CHAMPION 

WITH the opening of the baseball season, the 
sporting urge stirs in one's blood and we 
turn to such books as " My Chess Career," by J. R. 
Capablanca. Mr. Capablanca, I gather from his 
text, plays chess very well. Wherein he unquestion- 
ably has something on me. 

His book is a combination of autobiography and 
pictorial examples of difficult games he has partici- 
pated in and won. I could understand the autobi- 
ographical part perfectly, but although I have seen 
chess diagrams in the evening papers for years, I 
never have been able to become nervous over one. 
It has always seemed to me that when you have 
seen one diagram of a chessboard you have seen 
them all. Therefore, I can give only a superficial 
review of the technical parts of Mr. Capablanca's 
book. 

His personal reminiscences, however, are full of 
poignant episodes. For instance, let us take an 

[190] 



CONFESSIONS OF A CHESS CHAMPION 

incident which occurred in his early boyhood when 
he found out what sort of man his father really 
was — a sombre event in the life of any boy, much 
more so for the boy Capablanca. 

" I was born in Havana, the capital of the Island 
of Cuba/' he says, '' the 19th of November, 1888. 
I was not yet five years old when by accident I 
came into my father's private office and found him 
playing with another gentleman. I had never seen 
a game of chess before; the pieces interested me 
and I went the next day to see them play again. 
The third day, as I looked on, my father, a very 
poor beginner, moved a Knight from a white square 
to another white square. His opponent, apparently 
not a better player, did not notice it. My father 
won, and I proceeded to call him a cheat and to 
laugh." 

Imagine the feelings of a young boy entering his 
father's private office and seeing a man whom he 
had been brought up to love and to revere moving 
a Knight from one white square to another. It is 
a wonder that the boy had the courage to grow up 
at all with a start in life like that. 

But he did grow up, and at the age of eight, in 
spite of the advice of doctors, he was a frequent 
visitor at the Havana Chess Club. As he says in 

[191 J 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

describing this period of his career, '' Soon Don 
Celso Golmayo, the strongest player there, was un- 
able to give me a rook." So you can see how good 
he was. Don Celso couldn't give him a rook. And 
if Don Celso couldn't, who on earth could? 

In his introduction, Mr. Capablanca (I wish 
that I could get it out of my head that Mr. Capa- 
blanca is possibly a relation of the Casablanca boy 
who did the right thing by the burning deck. They 
are, of course, two entirely different people) — in 
his introduction, Mr. Capablanca says: 

"Conceit I consider a foolish thing; but more 
foolish still is that false modesty that vainly at- 
tempts to conceal that which all facts tend to prove." 

It is this straining to overcome a foolish, false 
modesty which leads him to say, in connection with 
his matches with members of the Manhattan Chess 
Club. " As one by one I mowed them down without 
the loss of a single game, my superiority became ap- 
parent." Or, in speaking of his '' endings " (a term 
we chess experts use to designate the last part of 
our game), to murmur modestly: "The endings 
I already played very well, and to my mind had 
attained the high standard for which they were in 
the future to be well known." Mr. Capablanca will 
have to watch that false modesty of his. It will get 
him into trouble some day. 

[192] 



CONFESSIONS OF A CHESS CHAMPION 

Although this column makes no pretense of carry- 
ing sporting news, it seems only right to print a 
part of the running story of the big game between 
Capablancaand Dr. O. S. Bernstein in the San Sebas- 
tian tournament of 191 1. Capablanca wore the 
white, while Dr. Bernstein upheld the honor of the 
black. 

The tense moment of the game had been reached. 
Capablanca has the ball on Dr. Bernstein's 3-yard 
line on the second down, with a minute and a half 
to play. The stands are wild. Cries of ^' Hold 
'em, Bernstein! " and "Touchdown, Capablanca! " 
ring out on the frosty November air. 

Brave voices are singing the fighting song en- 
titled " Capablanca's Day " which runs as follows: 

" Oh, sweep, sweep across the board, 
With your castles, queens, and pawns; 
We are with you, all Havana's horde, 
Till the sun of victory dawns; 
Then it's fight, jight, FIGHT! 
To your last white knight, 
For the truth must win alway, 
And our hearts beat true 
Old " J. R." for you 
On Capa-blanca's Day." 

[193] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

" Up to this point the game had proceeded along 
the lines generally recommended by the masters," 
writes Capablanca. '^ The last move, however, is 
a slight deviation from the regular course, which 
brings this Knight back to B in order to leave open 
the diagonal for the Q, and besides is more in ac- 
cordance with the defensive nature of the game. 
Much more could be said as to the reasons that 
make Kt - B the preferred move of most masters. 
... Of course, lest there be some misapprehension, 
let me state that the move Kt - B is made in con- 
junction with K R - K, which comes first." 

It is lucky that Mr. Casablanca made that ex- 
planation, for I was being seized with just that 
misapprehension which he feared. (Mr. Capa- 
blanca, I mean.) 

Below is the box-score by innings: 

1. P-K4. P-K4. 

2. Kt-QB3. Kt-QB3. 

3. P-B4. PxP. 

4. Kt-B3. P-KKt4. 

(Game called on account of darkness.) 



[194] 



XXXVIII 
"RIP VAN WINKLE" 

AFTER all, there is nothing like a good folk- 
opera for wholesome fun, and the boy who 
can turn out a rollicking folk-opera for old and 
young is Percy MacKaye. His latest is a riot from 
start to finish. You can buy it in book form, pub- 
lished by Knopf. Just ask for " Rip Van Winkle " 
and spend the evening falling out of your chair. 
(You wake up just as soon as you fall and are all 
ready again for a fresh start.) 

Of course it is a little rough in spots, but you 
know what Percy MacKaye is when he gets loose 
on a folk-opera. It is good, clean Rabelaisian fun, 
such as was in '' Washington, the Man Who Made 
Us." I always felt that it was very prudish of the 
police to stop that play just as it was commencing 
its run. Or maybe it wasn't the police that stopped 
it. Something did, I remember. 

But '' Rip Van Winkle " has much more zip to it 
than " Washington " had. In the first place, the 
lyrics are better. They have more of a lilt to them 
than the lines of the earlier work had. Here is the 

[195] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

song hit of the first act, sung by the Goose Girl. 
Try this over on your piano: 

Kaaterskill, Kaaterskill, 
Cloud on the Kaaterskill! 
Will it be fair, or lower? 
Silver rings 
On my pond I see; 
And my gander he 
Shook both his white wings 
Like a sunshine shower. 

I venture to say that Irving Berlin himself 
couldn't have done anything catchier than that by 
way of a lyric. Or this little snatch of a refrain 
sung by the old women of the town: 

Nay, nay, nay! 

A sunshine shower 

Won't last a half an hour. 

The trouble with most l3n-ics is that they are writ- 
ten by song-writers who have had no education. Mr. 
MacKaye's college training shows itself in every 
line of the opera. There is a sublety of rhyme- 
scheme, a delicacy of metre, and, above all, an 
originality of thought and expression which prom- 
ises much for the school of university-bred lyricists- 

[196] 



'' RIP VAN WINKLE '' 

Here, for instance, is a lyric which Joe McCarthy 
could never have written: 

Up spoke Nancy, spanking Nancy, 

Says, " My feet are jar too dancy, Dancy 01 

So foot-on-the-grass, 

Foot-on-the- grass, 

Foot-on-the- grass is my fancy, O! " 

Of course this is a folk-opera. And you can get 
away with a great deal of that " dancy-o " stuff 
when you call it a folk-opera. You can throw it 
all back on the old folk at home and they can't say 
a word. 

But even the local wits of Rip Van Winkle's time 
would have repudiated the comedy lines which Mr. 
MacKaye gives Rip to say in which " Katy-did " 
and " Katy-didn't " figure prominently as the nub, 
followed, before you have time to stop laughing, by 
one about "whip poor Will" (whippoorwill — get 
it?). If " Rip Van Winkle " is ever produced again, 
Ed Wynn should be cast as Rip. He would eat that 
line alive. 

Ed Wynn, by the way, might do wonders by the 
opera if he could get the rights to produce it in his 
own way. Let Mr. MacKaye 's name stay on the 
programme, but give Ed Wynn the white card to do 

[197] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

as he might see fit with the book. For instance, 
one of Mr. MacKaye's characters is named " Dirck 
Spuytenduyvil." Let him stand as he is, but give 
him two cousins, '' Mynheer Yonkers " and " Jan 
One Hundred and Eighty-third Street." The three 
of them could do a comedy tumbling act. There is 
practically no end to the features that could be in- 
troduced to tone the thing up. 

The basic idea of '' Rip Van Winkle " would lend 
itself admirably to Broadway treatment, for Mr. 
MacKaye has taken liberties, with the legend and 
introduced the topical idea of a Magic Flask, con- 
taining home-made hootch. Hendrick Hudson, the 
Captain of the Catskill Bowling Team, is the lucky 
possessor of the doctor's prescription and formula, 
and it is in order to take a trial spin with the brew 
that Rip first goes up to the mountain. Here are 
Hendrick's very words of invitation: 

You'll be right welcome. I will let you taste 

A wonder drink we brew aboard the Half Moon. 

Whoever drinks the Magic Flask thereof 

Forgets all lapse of time 

And wanders ever in the fairy season 

Of youth and spring. 

Come join me in the mountains 

At mid of night 

And there I promise you the Magic Flask, 

[ 198 ] 



'' RIP VAN WINKLE " 

And so at mid of night Rip fell for the prom- 
ise of wandering '' in the fairy season," as so many 
have done at the invitation of a man who has " made 
a little something at home which you couldn't tell 
from the real stuff." Rip got out of it easily. He 
simply went to sleep for twenty years. You ought 
to see a man I know. 

There is a note in the front of the volume saying 
that no public reading of " Rip Van Winkle " may 
be given without first getting the author's permis- 
sion. It ought to be made much more difficult to 
do than that. 



[199] 



XXXIX 

LITERARY LOST AND FOUND 
DEPARTMENT 

With Scant Apology to the Book Section of the 
New York Times. 

"Old Black Tillie'' 

HG.L. — When I was a little girl, my nurse 
• used to recite a poem something like the fol- 
lowing (as near as I can remember). I wonder if 
anyone can give me the missing lines? 

** Old Black Tillie lived in the dell, 

Heigh-ho with a rum-tum-tum! 

Something, something, something like a lot of hell, 

Heigh-ho with a rum-tum-tum! 

She wasn't very something and she wasn't very 

fat 
But — " 

" Victor Hugo's Death " 

M.K.C. — Is it true that Victor Hugo did not 
die but is still living in a little shack in Colorado? 

[ 200 ] 



LITERARY LOST AND FOUND 

" I^M Sorry That I Spelt the Word '' 

J.R.A. — Can anyone help me out by furnishing 
the last three words to the following stanza which 
I learned in school and of which I have forgotten 
the last three words, thereby driving myself crazy? 

'' ' Vm sorry that I spelt the wordy 
I hate to go above you, 
Because — ' the brown eyes lower jell, 
* Because, you see, 



} )> 



" God's in His Heaven '' 

J.A.E. ~ Where did Mark Twain write the fol- 
lowing? 

" God's in his heaven: 
All's right with the world," 

** She Dwelt Beside " 

N.K.Y. — Can someone locate this for me and 
tell the author? 

" She dwelt among untrodden ways, 
Beside the springs of Dove, 
To me she gave sweet Charity, 
But greater jar is Love." 

[201] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

" The Golden Wedding " 

K.L.F. — Who wrote the following and what 
does it mean? 

" Oh, de golden wedding, 
Oh, de golden wedding, 
Oh, de golden wedding, 
De golden, golden wedding! 



>f 



ANSWERS 

" When Grandma Was a Girl " 

Luther F. Neam, Flushing, L. I. — The poem 
asked for by ^' E.J.K." w^as recited at a Free Soil riot 
in Ashburg, Kansas, in July, 1850. It was entitled, 
" And That's the Way They Did It When Grandma 
Was a Girl," and was written by Bishop Leander B. 
Rizzard. The last line runs: 

"And that's they way they did it, when Grandma 
was a girl/' 

Others who answered this query were: Lillian W. 
East, of Albany; Martin B. Forsch, New York City, 
and Henry Cabot Lodge, Nahant. 

[ 202 ] 



LITERARY LOST AND FOUND 

" Let Us Then Be Up and Doing " 

Roger F. Nilkette, Presto, N.J. — Replying to 
the query in your last issue concerning the origin of 
the lines: 

" Let us then be up and doing, 
With a heart for any fate. 
Still achieving, still pursuing, 
Learn to labor and to wait." 

I remember hearing these lines read at a gather- 
ing in the Second Baptist Church of Presto, N. J., 
when I was a young man, by the Reverend Harley 
N. Ankle. It was said at the time among his parish- 
ioners that he himself wrote them and on being 
questioned on the matter he did not deny it, simply 
smiling and saying, " I'm glad if you liked them." 
They were henceforth known in Presto as ^' Dr. 
Ankle's verse " and were set to music and sung at 
his funeral. 

" The December Bride, or Old Robin " 

Charles B. Rennit, Boston, N. H. — The 
whole poem wanted by '' H.J.O." is as follows^ and 
appeared in Hosteller's Annual in 1843. 

[203] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 
I 

" 'Twas in the bleak December that I took her for 

my bride; 
How well do 1 remember how she fluttered by my 

side; 
My Nellie dear, it was not long before you up and 

died, 
And they buried her at eight-thirty in the morning. 



'' Oh, do not tell me of the charms of maidens far 

and near. 
Their charming ways and manners I do not care to 

hear. 
For Lucy dear was to me so very, very dear, 
And they buried her at eight-thirty in the morning. 



" Then it's merrily, merrily, merrily, ivhoa! 
To the old gray church they come and go, 
Some to be married and some to be buried. 
And old Robin has gone for the mail.'* 

"The Old King's Joke" 

F. J. Bruff, Hammick, Conn. — In a recent issue 
of your paper, Lillian F. Grothman asked for the 

[204] 



LITERARY LOST AND FOUND 

remainder of a poem which began: " The King of 
Sweden made a joke, ha, ha! '' 

I can furnish all of this poem, having written it 
myself, for which I was expelled from St. Domino's 
School in 1895. If Miss Grothman will meet me in 
the green room at the Biltmore for tea on Wednes- 
day next at 4:30, she will be supplied with the 
missing words. 



\ 



[205] 



XL 
" DARKWATER " 

WE have so many, many problems in America. 
Books are constantly being written offering 
solutions for them, but still they persist. 

There are volumes on auction bridge, family 
budgets and mind-training. A great many people 
have ideas on what should be done to relieve the 
country of certain undesirable persons who have 
displayed a lack of sympathy with American insti- 
tutions. (As if American institutions needed sym- 
pathy! ) And some of the more generous-minded 
among us are writing books showing our duty to 
the struggling young nationalities of Europe. It 
is bewildering to be confronted by all these prob- 
lems, each demanding intelligent solution. 

Little wonder, then, that we have no time for 
writing books on the one problem which is exclu- 
sively our own. With so many wrongs in the world 
to be righted, who can blame us for overlooking 
the one tragic wrong which lies at our door? With 
so many heathen to whom the word of God must be 

[206] 



" DARKWATER " 

brought and so many wild revolutionists in whom 
must be instilled a respect for law and order, is it 
strange that we should ourselves sometimes lump 
the word of God and the principles of law and order 
together under the head of " sentimentality '^ and 
shrug our shoulders? Justice in the abstract is our 
aim — any American will tell you that — so why 
haggle over details and insist on justice for the 
negro? 

But W. E. B. Du Bois does insist on justice for 
the negro, and in his book " Darkwater " (Har- 
court. Brace & Co.) his voice rings out in a bitter 
warning through the complacent quiet which usually 
reigns around this problem of America. Mr. Du 
Bois seems to forget that we have the affairs of a 
great many people to attend to and persists in call- 
ing our attention to this affair of our own. And 
what is worse, in the minds of all well-bred persons 
he does not do it at all politely. He seems to be 
quite distressed about something. 

Maybe it is because he finds himself, a man of 
superior mind and of sensitive spirit who is a grad- 
uate of Harvard, a professor and a sincere worker 
for the betterment of mankind, relegated to an in- 
ferior order by many men and women who are 
obviously his inferiors, simply because he happens 

[207] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

to differ from them in the color of his skin. Maybe 
it is because he sees the people of his own race who 
have not had his advantages (if a negro may ever 
be said to have received an advantage) being 
crowded into an ignominious spiritual serfdom 
equally as bad as the physical serfdom from 
which they were so recently freed. Maybe it is 
because of these things that Mr. Du Bois seems 
overwrought. 

Or perhaps it is because he reads each day of 
how jealous we are, as a Nation, of the sanctity of 
our Constitution, how we revere it and draw a flash- 
ing sword against its detractors, and then sees this 
very Constitution being flouted as a matter of course 
in those districts where the amendment giving the 
negroes a right to vote is popularly considered one 
of the five funniest jokes in the world. 

Perhaps he hears candidates for office insisting on 
a reign of law or a plea for order above all things, 
by some sentimentalist or other, or public speakers 
advising those who have not respect for American 
institutions to go back whence they came, and then 
sees whole sections of the country violating every 
principle of law and order and mocking American 
institutions for the sake of teaching a '^ nigger " 
his place. 

[208] 



" DARKWATER '' 

Perhaps during the war he heard of the bloody 
crimes of our enemies, and saw preachers and edi- 
tors and statesmen stand aghast at the barbaric 
atrocities which won for the German the name of 
Hun, and then looked toward his own people and 
saw them being burned, disembowelled and tortured 
with a civic unanimity and tacit legal sanction which 
made the word Hun sound weak. 

Perhaps he has heard it boasted that in America 
every man who is honest, industrious and intelligent 
has a good chance to win out, and has seen honest, 
industrious and intelligent men whose skins are black 
stopped short by a wall so high and so thick that 
all they can do, on having reached that far, is to 
bow their heads and go slowly back. 

Any one of these reasons should have been suffi- 
cient for having written " Darkwater." 

It is unfortunate that Mr. Du Bois should have 
raised this question of our own responsibility just 
at this time when we were showing off so nicely. It 
may remind some one that instead of taking over 
a protectorate of Armenia we might better take over 
a protectorate of the State of Georgia, which yearly 
leads the proud list of lynchers. But then, there 
will not be enough people who see Mr. Du Bois's 
book to cause any great national movement, so we 
are quite sure, for the time being, of being able to 

[209] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

devote our energies to the solution of our other 
problems. 

Don't forget, therefore, to write your Congress- 
man about a universal daylight-saving bill, and give 
a little thought, if you can, to the question of the 
vehicular tunnel. 



[210] 



XLI 
THE NEW TIME-TABLE 

THE new time-table of the New York Central 
Railroad (New York Central Railroad, Har- 
lem Division. Form 113. Corrected to March 28, 
1922) is an attractive folder, done in black and 
white, for the suburban trade. It slips neatly into 
the pocket, where it easily becomes lost among 
letters and bills, appearing again only when you 
have procured another. 

So much for its physical features. Of the text 
matter it is difficult to write without passion. No 
more disheartening work has been put on the market 
this season. 

In an attempt to evade the Daylight-Saving Law 
the New York Central has kept its clocks at what 
is called " Eastern Standard Time," meaning that 
it is standard on East 42 d Street between Vander- 
bilt and Lexington Avenues. Practically everywhere 
else in New York the clocks are an hour ahead. 

It is this " Eastern Standard Time " that gives 
the time-table its distinctive flavor. Each train has 
been demoted one hour, and then, for fear that it 

[211] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

would be too easy to understand this, an extra three 
or four minutes have been thrown in or taken out, 
just so that no mistake can help being made. 

In order to read the new time-table understand- 
ingly the following procedure is now necessary: 

Take a room in some quiet family hotel where 
the noise from the street is reduced to minimum. 
Place the time-table on the writing-desk and sit in 
front of it, holding a pencil in the right hand and 
a watch (Eastern Christian Time) in the left. Then 
decide on the time you think you would like to 
reach home. Let us say that you usually have 
dinner at 7. You would, if you could do just what 
you wanted, reach Valhalla at 6:30. Very well. It 
takes about an hour from the Grand Central Termi- 
nal to Valhalla. How about a train leaving around 
5:30? 

Look at the time-table for a train which leaves 
about 2:45 (Eastern Standard Time). Write down, 
"2:45 " 0^ ^ piece of paper. Add 150. Subtract 
the number of stations that Valhalla is above White 
Plains. Sharpen your pencil and bind up your cut 
finger and subtract the number you first thought of, 
and the result will show the number of Presidents 
of the United States who have been assassinated 
while in office. Then go over to the Grand Central 

[212 ] 




"Listen, Ed! This is how it goes!" 



THE NEW TIME-TABLE 

Terminal and ask one of the information clerks 
what you want to know. 

They will be glad to see you, for during the last 
three days they have been actually hungering for 
the sight of a human face. Sometimes it has seemed 
to them that the silence and loneliness there behind 
the information counter would drive them mad. If 
some one — any one — would only come and speak 
to them! That is why one of them is over in the 
corner chewing up time-tables into small balls and 
playing marbles with them. He has gone mad from 
loneliness. The other clerk, the one who is looking 
at the tip of his nose and mumbling Lincoln's Gettys- 
burg Address, has only a few more minutes before 
he too succumbs. 

And that low, rumbling sound, what is that? It 
comes from the crowd of commuters standing in 
front of the gate of what used to be the 5:56. Let 
us draw near and hear what they are discussing. 
Why, it is the new time-table, of all things! 

^'Listen, Ed. This is how it goes. This train 
that goes at 4:25 according to this time-table is 
really the old 5:20. See? What you do is add 
an hour " 

"Aw, what kind of talk is that? Add an hour 
to your grandmother! You subtract an hour from 

[213] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

the time as given here. This is Eastern Standard 
Time. See, it says right here : ' The time shown 
in this folder is Eastern Standard Time, one hour 
slower than Daylight-Saving Time.' See? One 
hour slower. You subtract." 

"Here, you guys are both way off. I just asked 
one of the trainmen. The 5:56 has gone. It went 
at 4:20. The next train that we get is the 6:20 
which goes at 5:19. Look, see here. It says 5:19 
on the time-table but that means that by your watch 
it is 6:19 " 

"By my watch it is not 6:19. My watch I 
set by the clock in the station this morning when I 
came in " 

" Well, the clock in the station is wrong. That 
is, the clock in the station is an hour ahead of all 
the other clocks." 

" An hour ahead? An hour behind, you mean." 

" The clock in the station is an hour ahead. I 
know what I'm talking about." 

"Now listen, Jo. Didn't you see in the paper 
Monday morning " 

" Yaas, I saw in the paper Monday morning, and 
it said that " 

"Look, Gus. By my watch — look, Gus — 
listen, Gus — by my watch " 

[214] 



THE NEW TIME-TABLE 

" Aw, you and your watch! What's that got to do 
with it? " 

" Now looka here. On this time-table it 
says " 

'' Lissen, Eddie " 



Whatever else its publishers may say about it, 
the new New York Central time-table bids fair to be 
the most-talked-of publication of the season. 



[2IS] 



XLII 
MR. BOK'S AMERICANIZATION 

IF ever you should feel important enough to write 
an autobiography to give to the world, and dis- 
like to say all the nice things about yourself that you 
feel really ought to be said, just write it in the third 
person. Edward Bok has done this in " The Ameri- 
canization of Edward Bok " and the effect is quite 
touching in its modesty. 

In " An Explanation '' at the beginning of the 
book Mr. Bok disclaims any credit for the winning 
ways and remarkable success of his hero, Edward 
Bok. Edward Bok, the little Dutch boy who landed 
in America in 1870 and later became the editor of 
the greatest women's advertising medium in the 
country, is an entirely different person from the 
Edward Bok who is telling the story. You under- 
stand this to begin with. Otherwise you may mis- 
judge the author. 

^' I have again and again found myself," writes 
Mr. Bok, " watching with intense amusement and 
interest the Edward Bok of this book at work. . . . 
His tastes, his outlook, his manner of looking at 

[216] 



MR. BOK'S AMERICANIZATION 

things were totally at variance with my own. . . . 
He has had and has been a personality apart from 
my private self." 

The only connection between Edward Bok the 
editor and Edward Bok the autobiographer seems 
to be that Editor Bok allows Author Bok to have 
a checking account in his bank under their common 
name. 

Thus completely detached from his hero, Mr. Bok 
proceeds and is able to narrate on page 3, in the 
manner of Horatio Alger, how young Edward, 
taunted by his Brooklyn schoolmates, gave a sound 
thrashing to the ringleader, after which he found 
himself " looking into the eyes of a crowd of very 
respectful boys and giggling girls, who readily made 
a passageway for his brother and himself when they 
indicated a desire to leave the school-yard and go 
home." 

He can also, without seeming in the least conceited, 
tell how, through his clear-sighted firmness in refus- 
ing to write in the Spencerian manner prescribed in 
school, he succeeded in bringing the Principal and 
the whole Board of Education to their senses, result- 
mg in a complete reversal of the public-school policy 
m the matter of handwriting instruction. 

The Horatio Alger note is dominant throughout 
the story of young Edward's boyhood. His cheer- 

[217] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

fulness and business sagacity so impressed everyone 
with whom he came in contact that he was soon 
outdistancing all the other boys in the process of 
self-advancement. And no one is more smilingly 
tolerant of the irresistible progress of young Edward 
Bok in making friends and money than Edward Bok 
the impersonal author of the book. He just loves 
to see the young boy get ahead. 

It will perhaps aid in getting an idea of the person- 
ality and confident presence of the Boy Bok to state 
that he was a feverish collector of autographs. WTien- 
ever any famous personage came to town the young 
man would find out at what hotel he was staying and 
would proceed to hound him until he had got him 
to write his name, with some appropriate sentiment, 
in a little book. In advertising the present volume 
the publishers give a list of names of historical char- 
acters who feature in Mr. Bok's reminiscences — 
Gens. Grant and Garfield, Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
Longfellow, Emerson and dozens of others. And so 
they do figure in the book, but as victims of the 
young Dutch boy's passion for autographs. Still, 
perhaps, they did not mind, for the author gives us to 
understand that they were all so charmed with the 
prepossessing manner and intelligent bearing of the 
young autograph hound that they not only were con- 

[218] 



MR. BOK'S AMERICANIZATION 

tinually asking him to dinner (he usually timed his 
visit so as to catch them just as they were entering 
the dining-room) but insisted on giving him letters 
of introduction to their friends. 

Only Mrs. Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Em- 
erson neglected to register extreme pleasure at being 
approached by the smiling lad. Both Mrs. Lincoln 
and Emerson were failing in their minds at the time, 
however, which satisfactorily explains their coolness, 
at least for the author. In Mrs. Lincoln's case an 
attempt was made to interest her in an autographed 
photograph of Gen. Grant. But " Edward saw 
that the widow of the great Lincoln did not men- 
tally respond to his pleasure in his possession." 
Could it have been possible that the widow of the 
great Lincoln was a trifle bored? 

The account of the intrusion on Emerson in Con- 
cord borders on the sacrilegious. Here was the ven- 
erable philosopher, five months before his death, 
when his great mind had already gone on before him, 
being visited by a strange lad with a passion for 
autographs, who sat and watched for those lucid 
moments when the sun would break through the 
clouded brain, making it possible for Emerson to 
hold the pen and form the letters of his name. Then 
young Edward was off, with another trophy in his 
belt and another stride made in his progress toward 

[219] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Americanization. Lovers of Emerson could wish 
that the impersonal editor of these memoirs had 
omitted the account of this victory. 

Americanization seems, from the present docu- 
ment, to consist of, first, making as many influential 
friends as possible who may be able to help you at 
some future time; second, making as much money 
as possible (young Edward used his position as sten- 
ographer to Jay Gk)uld to glean tips on the market, 
thereby cleaning up for himself and his Sunday- 
school teacher at Plymouth Church), and third, 
keeping your eye open for the main chance. 

In conclusion, nothing more fitting could be quoted 
than the touching caption under the picture of the 
author's grandmother, " who counselled each of her 
children to make the world a better and more beau- 
tiful place to live in — a counsel which is now being 
carried on by her grandchildren, one of whom is Ed- 
ward Bok." 

Could detachment of author and hero be more 
complete? 



[ 220 ] 



XLIII 
ZANE GREY'S MOVIE 

THE hum of the moving-picture machine is the 
predominating note in " The Mysterious 
Rider," Zane Grey's latest contribution to the liter- 
ature of unrealism. All that is necessary for a com- 
plete illusion is the insertion of three or four news 
photographs at the end, showing how they catch 
salmon in the Columbia River, the allegorical floats 
in the Los Angeles Carnival of Roses and the ice- 
covered fire ruins in the business section of Wor- 
cester, Mass. 

In order that the change from book to film may 
be made as quickly as possible, the author has writ- 
ten his story in the language of the moving-picture 
subtitle. All that the continuity-writer in the studio 
will have to do will be to take every third sentence 
from the book and make a subtitle from it. We 
might save him the trouble and do it here, together 
with some suggestions for incidental decorations. 

Remember, nothing will be quoted below which is 
not in the exact wording of Zane Grey's text. 

[221 ] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

We first see Columbine Belllounds, adopted 
daughter of old BelUounds the rancher of Colorado. 
She is riding along the trail overlooking the valley. 

'' TODAY GIRLISH ORDEALS AND GRIEFS 
SEEMED BACK IN THE PAST: SHE WAS A 
WOMAN AT NINETEEN AND FACE TO FACE 
WITH THE FIRST GREAT PROBLEM IN HER 
LIFE." (Suggestion for title decoration: A pair 
of reluctant feet standing at the junction of a brook 
and a river.) 

She stops to pick some columbines and solilo- 
quizes. The author says: ^' She spoke aloud, as if 
the sound of her voice might convince her/' but it 
is not clear from the text just what she expected to 
be convinced of. Here is her argument to herself : 

''COLUMBINE! ... SO THEY NAMED 
ME — THOSE MINERS WHO FOUND ME — 
A BABY — LOST IN THE WOODS — ASLEEP 
AMONG THE COLUMBINES." (Decorative 
nasturtiums.) 

Having convinced herself in these reassuring 
words as she stands alone on the ridge in God's 
great outdoors, she explains that she has promised 
to marry Jack BelUounds, the worthless son of her 
foster-father, although any one can tell that she is 
in love with Wilson Moore, a cow-puncher on the 
ranch. You will understand what a sacrifice this 

[ 222 ] 



ZANE GREY'S MOVIE 

was to be when the author says that '' the lower 
part of Jack Belllounds's face was weak." 

To the ranch comes '' Hell-Bent " Wade, the mys- 
terious man of the plains. He applies for a job, and 
not only that, but he gets it, which gives him a 
chance to let us know that: 

'' EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO HE HAD 
DRIVEN THE WOMAN HE LOVED AWAY 
FROM HIM, OUT INTO THE WORLD WITH 
HER BABY GIRL . . . JEALOUS FOOL! . . . 
TOO LATE HAD HE DISCOVERED HIS 
FATAL BLUNDER. . . . THAT WAS BENT 
WADE'S SECRET." (Fancy sketch of a secret.) 

And as we already know that Columbine is al- 
most nineteen (I think she told herself this fact 
aloud once when she was out riding alone, just to 
convince herself), the shock is not so great as it 
might have been to hear Wade murmur aloud 
(doubtless to convince himself too), ^' Baby would 
have been — let's see — 'most nineteen years old 
now — if she'd lived." 

Any bets on who Columbine really is? 

Let us digress from the scenario a minute to cite 
a scintillating passage, one of many in the book. 
Wade is speaking: 

" ' You can never tell what a dog is until you 

[223] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

know him. Dogs are like men. Some of 'em look 
good, but they're really bad. An' that works the 
other way round.' " 

Oscar Wilde stuff, that is. How often have you 
felt the truth of what Mr. Grey says here, and yet 
have never been able to put it into words! It is 
this ability to put thoughts into words that makes 
him one of our most popular authors today. 

But enough of this. " Hell-Bent " Wade deter- 
mines that his little gel shall not know him as her 
father, and, furthermore, that she shall not marry 
Jack Belllounds. So he goes to the cabin of Wils 
Moore and tells him that Columbine is unhappy at 
the thought of her approaching — you guessed it — 
nuptials. 

" PARD! SHE LOVES ME — STILL? " 
" WILS, HERS IS THE KIND THAT GROWS 
STRONGER WITH TIME, I KNOW." (Heart 
and an hour-glass intertwined.) 

Let it be said right here, however, that Jack 
Belllounds, rough and villainous as he is, is the kind 
of cow-puncher who says to his father: ''I still 
love you, dad, despite the cruel thing you did to 
me." No cow-puncher who says " despite " can 
be entirely bad. Neither can he be a cow-puncher. 

[ 224] 



ZANE GREY'S MOVIE 

It is later, after a thrilling series of physical 
encounters, that Columbine tells Jack Belllounds in 
so many words that she loves Wils Moore. ^' Then 
Wade saw the glory of her — saw her mother again 
in that proud, fierce uplift of face that flamed red 
and then blazed white — saw hate and passion and 
love in all their primal nakedness. 

"LOVE HIM! LOVE WILSON MOORE? 
YES, YOU FOOL! I LOVE HIM! YES! YES! 
YES! " (Decorative heart, in which a little door 
slowly opens, showing the face of Columbine.) 

But time is short and there is a Semon comedy to 
follow immediately after this. So all that we can 
divulge is that Jack has Wils Moore wrongly ac- 
cused of cattle-rustling, bringing down on his own 
head the following chatty bit from his affianced 
bride : 

" SO THAT'S YOUR REVENGE. . . . BUT 
YOU'RE TO RECKON WITH ME, JACK 
BELLLOUNDS! YOU VILLAIN! YOU DEVIL! 
YOU" 

It would be unfair to the millions of readers who 
will struggle for possession of the circulating-library 
copies of " The Mysterious Rider " to tell just what 
happens after this. But need we hesitate to divulge 
that the final subtitle will be: 

[225] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

" ' I HAVE FAITH AND HOPE AND LOVE, 
FOR I AM HIS DAUGHTER.' A FAINT, COOL 
BREEZE STRAYED THROUGH THE ASPENS, 
RUSTLING THE LEAVES WHISPERINGLY, 
AND THE SLENDER COLUMBINES, GLEAM- 
ING PALE IN THE TWILIGHT LIFTED 
THEIR SWEET FACES." (Decorative bull.) 



[226] 



XLIV 
SUPPRESSING "JURGEN" 

OF course it was silly to suppress ^^ Jurgen." 
That goes without saying. But it seems 
equally silly, because of its being suppressed, to 
hail it as high art. It is simply Mr. James Branch 
Cabell's quaint way of telling a raw story and it 
isn't particularly his own way, either. Personally, 
I like the modern method much better. 

" Jurgen " is a frank imitation of the old-time 
pornographers and although it is a very good imi- 
tation, it need not rank Mr. Cabell any higher than 
the maker of a plaster-of-paris copy of some Boeotian 
sculptural oddity. 

The author, in defense of his fortunate book, 
lifts his eyebrows and says, " Honi soit." He 
claims, and quite rightly, that everything he has 
written has at least one decent meaning, and that 
anyone who reads anything indecent into it automat- 
ically convicts himself of being in a pathological 
condition. The question is, if Mr. Cabell had been 
convinced beforehand that nowhere in all this broad 
land would there be anyone who would read another 

[227] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

meaning into his lily-white words, would he ever 
have bothered to write the book at all? 

Mr. Cabell is admittedly a genealogist. He is an 
earnest student of the literature of past centuries. 
He has become so steeped in the phrases and lit- 
erary mannerisms of the middle and upper-middle 
ages that, even in his book of modern essays "Be- 
yond Life," he is constantly emitting strange words 
which were last used by the correspondents 
who covered the crusades. No man has to be as 
artificially obsolete as Mr. Cabell is. He likes 
to be. 

In " Jurgen " he has simply let himself go. There 
is no pretense of writing like a modern. There is 
no pretense of writing in the style of even James 
Branch Cabell. It is frankly " in the manner of " 
those ancient authors whose works are sold sur- 
reptitiously to college students by gentlemen who 
whisper their selling-talk behind a line of red sample 
bindings. And it is not in the manner of Rabelais, 
although Rabelais ^s name has been frequently used 
in describing " Jurgen." Rabelais seldom hid his 
thought behind two meanings. There was only one 
meaning, and you could take it or leave it. And 
Rabelais would never have said " Honi soit " by 
way of defense. 

The general effect is one of Fielding or Sterne 

[228] 



SUPPRESSING " JURGEN " 

telling the story of Sir Gawain and the Green 
Knight, with their own embellishments, to the boys 
at the club. 

If all that is necessary to produce a work of art 
is to take a drummer's story and tell it in dusty 
English, we might try our luck with the modern 
smoking-car yarn about the traveling-man who 
came to the country hotel late at night, and see 
how far we can get with it in the manner of James 
Branch Cabell imitating Fielding imitating some- 
one else. 

It is a tale which they narrate in Nouveau Ro- 
chelle, saying: In the old days there came one night 
a traveling man to an inn, and the night was late, 
and he was sore beset, what with rag-tag-and-bob- 
tail. Eftsoons he made known his wants to the 
churl behind the desk, who was named Gogyrvan. 
And thus he spake: 

" Any rooms? " 

" Indeed, sir, no," was Gogyrvan's glose. 

" Now but this is an deplorable thing, God wot," 
says the traveling man. " Fie, brother, but you 
think awry. Come, don smart your thinking-cap 
and answer me again. An' you have forgot my 
query; it was: * Any rooms, bo? ' " 

[229] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Whereat the churl behind the desk gat him down 
from his stool and closed one eye in a wink. 

" There is one room,'^ he says, and places his 
forefinger along the side of his nose, in the manner 
of a man who places his forefinger along the side of 
his nose. 

But at this point I am stopped short by the warn- 
ing passage through the room of a cold, damp cur- 
rent of air as from the grave, and I know that it 
is one of Mr. Sumner's vice deputies flitting by on 
his rounds in defense of the public morals. So I 
can go no further, for public morals must be de- 
fended even at the cost of public morality (a state- 
ment which means nothing but which sounds rather 
well, I think. I shall try to work it in again some 
time). 

But perhaps enough has been said to show that 
it is perfectly easy to write something that will 
sound classic if you can only remember enough 
old words. When Mr. Cabell has learned the lan- 
guage, he ought to write a good book in modern 
English. There are lots of people who read it and 
they speak very highly of it as a means of ex- 
pression. 

But there are certain things that you cannot ex- 
press in it without sounding crass, which would be 
a disadvantage in telling a story like " Jurgen." 

[230] 



XLV 

anti-ibAnez 

WHILE on the subject of books which we read 
because we think we ought to, and while 
Vicente Blasco Ibaiiez is on the ocean and can't hear 
what is being said, let's form a secret society. 

I will be one of any three to meet behind a barn 
and admit that I would not give a good gosh darn 
if a fortune-teller were to tell me tomorrow that I 
should never, never have a chance to read another 
book by the great Spanish novelist. 

Any of the American reading public who desire 
to join this secret society may do so without 
fear of publicity, as the names will not be given 
out. The only means of distinguishing a fellow- 
member will be a tiny gold emblem, to be worn in 
the ilapel, representing the figure (couchant) o^f 
Spain's most touted animal. The motto will be 
" Nimmermehr,'' which is a German translation of 
the Spanish phrase " Not even once again.'' 

Simply because I myself am not impressed by a 
book, I have no authority to brand anyone who 

[231 ] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

does not like it as a poseur and say that he is only 
making believe that he likes it. And there must 
be a great many highly literary people who really 
and sincerely do think that Sefior Blasco's books 
are the finest novels of the epoch. 

It would therefore be presumptuous of me to say 
that Spain is now, for the first time since before 
1898, in a position to kid the United States and, 
vicariously through watching her famous son count 
his royalties and gate receipts, to feel avenged for 
the loss of her islands. If America has found some- 
thing superfine in Ibanez that his countrymen have 
missed, then America is of course to be congratu- 
lated and not kidded. 

But probably no one was more surprised than 
Blasco when he suddenly found himself a lion in 
our literary arena instead of in his accustomed role 
of bull in his home ring. And those who know say 
that you could have knocked his compatriots over 
with a feather when the news came that old man 
Ibafiez's son had made good in the United States 
to the extent of something like five hundred million 
pesetas. 

For, like the prophet whom some one was telling 
about, Ibanez was not known at home as a 
particularly hot tamale. But, then, he never had 
such a persistent publisher in Spain, and book-ad- 

[232 ] 



ANTI-IBANEZ 

vertising is not the art there that it is in America. 
When the final accounting of the great success of 
" The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse " in this 
country is taken, honorable mention must be made 
of the man at the E. P. Button & Co. store who 
had charge of the advertising. 

The great Spanish novelist was in the French 
propaganda service during the war. It was his 
job to make Germany unpopular in Spanish. " The 
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse " is obviously 
propaganda, and not particularly subtle propaganda 
either. Certain chapters might have come direct 
from our own Creel committee, and one may still 
be true to the Allied cause and yet maintain that 
propaganda and literature do not mix with any de- 
gree of illusion. 

There is no question, of course, that those chap- 
ters in the book which are descriptive of the ad- 
vance and subsequent retreat of the German troops 
under the eye of Don Marcelo are masterpieces of 
descriptive reporting. But Philip Gibbs has given 
us a whole book of masterpieces of descriptive 
reporting which do not bear the stamp of ap- 
proval of the official propaganda bureau. And, 
furthermore, Philip Gibbs does not wear a sport 
shirt open at the neck. At least, he never had his 
picture taken that way. 

[ 233 ] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

As for the rest of the books that were dragged 
out from the Spanish for " storehouse " when " The 
Four Horsemen " romped in winners, I can speak 
only as I would speak of " The World's Most Fa- 
mous Battles " or " Heroines in Shakespeare. '^ I 
have looked them over. I gave " Mare Nostrum " 
a great deal of my very valuable time because the 
advertisements spoke so highly of it. ^' Woman 
Triumphant " took less time because I decided to 
stop earlier in the book. " Blood and Sand " I 
passed up, having once seen a Madrid bull-fight for 
myself, which may account for this nasty attitude 
I have toward any Spanish product. I am told, 
however, that this is the best of them all. 

It is remarkable that for a writer who seems to 
have left such an indelible imprint in the minds of 
the American people, whose works have been ranked 
with the greatest of all time and who received more 
publicity during one day of his visit here than 
Charles Dickens received during his whole sojourn 
in America, Seiior Blasco and his works form a 
remarkably small part of the spontaneous literary 
conversation of the day. The characters which he 
has created have not taken any appreciable hold 
in the public imagination. Their names are never 
used as examples of anything. Who were some of 
his chief characters, by the way? What did they 

[234] 



ANTI-IBANEZ 

say that was worth remembering? What did they 
do that characters have not been doing for many 
generations? Did you ever hear anyone say, ^' He 
talks like a character in Ibaiiez," or " This might 
have happened in one of Ibafiez's books '7 

Of course it is possible for a man to write a great 
book from which no one would quote. That is 
probably happening all the time. But it is because 
no one has read it. Here we have an author whose 
vogue in this country, according to statistics, is equal 
to that of any writer of novels in the world. And 
as soon as his publicity department stops function- 
ing, I should like to lay a little bet that he will not 
be heard of again. 



[235] 



XLVI 
ON BRICKLAYING 

AFTER a series of introspective accounts of 
the babyhood, childhood, adolescence and in- 
evitably gloomy maturity of countless men and 
women, it is refreshing to turn to " Bricklaying in 
Modern Practice," by Stewart Scrimshaw. " Heigh- 
ho! " one says. '' Back to normal again! " 

For bricklaying is nothing if not normal, and Mr. 
Scrimshaw has given just enough of the romantic 
charm of artistic enthusiasm to make it positively 
fascinating. 

" There was a time when man did not know how 
to lay bricks," he says in his scholarly introductory 
chapter on " The Ancient Art," " a time when he 
did not know how to make bricks. There was a 
time when fortresses and cathedrals were unknown, 
and churches and residences were not to be seen 
on the face of the earth. But today we see won- 
derful architecture, noble and glorious structures, 
magnificent skyscrapers and pretty home-like 
bungalows." 

To one who has been scouring Westchester 

[236] 



ON BRICKLAYING 

County for the past two months looking at the 
structures which are being offered for sale as homes, 
" pretty home-like bungalows " comes as le mot 
juste. They certainly are no more than pretty 
home-like. 

One cannot read far in Mr. Scrimshaw's book 
without blushing for the inadequacy of modern edu- 
cation. We are turned out of our schools as edu- 
cated young men and women, and yet what college 
graduate here tonight can tell me when the first 
brick in Amercia was made? Or even where it was 
made? ... I thought not. 

Well, it was made in New Haven in 1650. Mr. 
Scrimshaw does not say what it was made for, 
but a conjecture would be that it was the handiwork 
of Yale students for tactical use in the Harvard 
game. (Oh, I know that Yale wasn't running in 
1650, but what difference does that make in an 
informal little article like this? It is getting so that 
a man can't make any statement at all without being 
caught up on it by some busybody or other.) 

But let's get down to the art itself. 

Mr. Scrimshaw's first bit of advice is very sound. 
" The bricklayer should first take a keen glance at 
the scaffolding upon which he is to work, to see 
that there is nothing broken or dangerous connected 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

with it. . . . This is essential, because more im- 
portant than anything else to him is the preserva- 
tion of his life and limb." 

Oh, Mr. Scrimshaw, how true that is! If I were 
a bricklayer I would devote practically my whole 
morning inspecting the scaffolding on which I was 
to work. Whatever else I shirked, I would put my 
whole heart and soul into this part of my task. 
Every rope should be tested, every board examined, 
and I doubt if even then I would go up on the scaf- 
fold. Any bricks that I could not lay with my feet 
on terra firma (there is a joke somewhere about 
terra cotta, but I'm busy now) could be laid by 
some one else. 

But we don't seem to be getting ahead in our 
instruction in practical bricklaying. Well, all right, 
take this: 

" Pressed bricks, which are buttered, can be laid 
with a one-eighth-inch joint, although a joint of 
three-sixteenths of an inch is to be preferred." 

Joe, get this gentleman a joint of three-sixteenths 
of an inch, buttered. Service, that's our motto! 

It takes a book like this to make a man realize 
what he misses in his everyday life. For instance, 
who would think that right here in New York there 

[238] 



ON BRICKLAYING 

were people who specialized in corbeling? Rain or 
shine, hot or cold, you will find them corbeling 
around like Trojans. Or when they are not corbel- 
ing they may be toothing. (I too thought that this 
might be a misprint for " teething," but it is spelled 
*' toothing " throughout the book, so I guess that 
Mr. Scrimshaw knows what he is about.) Of all 
departments of bricklaying I should think that it 
would be more fun to tooth than to do anything 
else. But it must be tiring work. I suppose that 
many a bricklayer's wife has said to her neighbor, 
" I am having a terrible time with my husband 
this week. He is toothing, and comes home so cross 
and irritable that nothing suits him." 

Another thing that a bricklayer has to be careful 
of, according to the author (and I have no reason 
to contest his warning), is the danger of stepping 
on spa wis. If there is one word that I would leave 
with the young bricklayer about to enter his trade 
it is " Beware of the spawls, my boy." They are 
insidious, those spawls are. You think you are all 
right and then — pouf! Or maybe " crash " would 
be a better descriptive word. Whatever noise is 
made by a spawl when stepped on is the one I want. 
Perhaps " swawk " would do. I'll have to look up 
" spawl " first, I guess. 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Well, anyway, there you have practical brick- 
laying in a nutshell. Of course there are lots of 
other points in the book and some dandy pictures 
and it would pay you to read it. But in case you 
haven't time, just skim over this resume again and 
you will have the gist of it. 



[240] 



XLVII 
^'AMERICAN ANNIVERSARIES " 

MR. PHILIP R. DILLON has compiled and 
published in his " American Anniversaries " 
a book for men who do things. For every day in 
the year there is a record of something which has 
been accomplished in American history. For in- 
stance, under Jan. i we find that the parcel-post 
system was inaugurated in the United States in 
1 9 13, while Jan. 2 is given as the anniversary of 
the battle of Murfreesboro (or S toners River, as you 
prefer). The whole book is like that; just one 
surprise after another. 

What, for instance, do you suppose that Saturday 
marked the completion of? . . . Presuming that 
no one has answered correctly, I will disclose (after 
consulting Mr. Dillon's book) that July 31 marked 
the completion of the 253d year since the signing 
of the Treaty of Breda. But what, you may say — 
and doubtless are saying at this very minute — what 
has the Treaty of Breda (which everyone knows 
was signed in Holland by representatives of Eng- 
land, France, Holland and Denmark) got to do with 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

American history? And right there is where Mr. 
Dillon and I would have you. In the Treaty of 
Breda, Acadia (or Nova Scotia) was given to France 
and New York and New Jersey were confirmed to 
England. So, you see, inhabitants of New York 
and New Jersey (and, after all, who isn't?) should 
have especial cause for celebrating July 31 as 
Breda Day, for if it hadn't been for that treaty 
we might have belonged to Poland and been mixed 
up in all the mess that is now going on over 
there. 

I must confess that I turned to the date of the 
anniversary of my own birth with no little expecta- 
tion. Of course I am not so very well known except 
among the tradespeople in my town, but I should be 
willing to enter myself in a popularity contest with 
the Treaty of Breda. But evidently there is a 
conspiracy of silence directed against me on the 
part of the makers of anniversary books and cal- 
endars. While no mention was made of my having 
been born on Sept. 15, considerable space was given 
to recording the fact that on that date in 1840 a 
patent for a knitting machine was issued to the 
inventor, who was none other than Isaac Wixan 
Lamb of Salem, Mass. 

Now I would be the last one to belittle the im- 

[242 ] 



" AMERICAN ANNIVERSARIES " 

portance of knitting or the invention of a knitting 
machine. I know some very nice people who knit 
a great deal. But really, when it comes to anniver- 
saries I don't see where Isaac Wixon Lamb gets off 
to crash in ahead of me or a great many other 
people that I could name. And it doesn't help any, 
either, to find that James Fenimore Cooper and 
William Howard Taft are both mentioned as having 
been born on that day or that the chief basic patent 
for gasoline automobiles in America was issued in 
1895 to George B. Selden. It certainly was a big 
day for patents. But one realizes more than ever 
after reading this section that you have to have a 
big name to get into an anniversary book. The av- 
erage citizen has no show at all. 

In spite of these rather obvious omissions, Mr. 
Dillon's book is both valuable and readable. Espec- 
ially in those events which occurred early in the 
country's history is there material for comparison 
with the happenings of the present day, events 
which will some day be incorporated in a similar 
book compiled by some energetic successor of Mr. 
Dillon. 

For instance, under Oct. 27, 1659, we find that 
William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson were 
banished from New Hampshire on the charge of be- 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

ing Quakers and were later executed for returning to 
the colony. Imagine! 

And on Dec. 8, 1837, Wendell Phillips delivered 
his first abolition speech at Boston in Faneuil Hall, 
as a result of which he got himself known around 
Boston as an undesirable citizen, a dangerous radical 
and a revolutionary trouble-maker. It hardly seems 
possible now, does it? 

And on July 4, 1776 — but there, why rub it in? 



[244] 



XLVIII 
A WEEK-END WITH WELLS 

IN the February Bookman there is an informal 
article by John Elliot called " At Home with H. 
G. Wells " in which we are let in on the ground floor 
in the Wells household and shown '' H. G." (as his 
friends and his wife call him) at play. It is an 
interesting glimpse at the small doings of a great 
man, but there is one feature of those doings which 
has an ominous sound. 

" The Wells that everyone loves who sees him 
at Easton is the human Wells, the family Wells, 
the jovial Wells, Wells the host of some Sunday 
afternoon party. For a distance of ten or twenty 
miles round folks come on Sunday to play hockey 
and have tea. Old and young — people from down 
London who never played hockey before in their 
lives; country farmers and their daughters, and 
everybody else who lives in the district — troop over 
and bring whoever happens to be the week-end 
guest. Wells is delightful to them all. He doesn't 
give a rap if they are solid Tories, Bolsheviks, Lib- 
erals, or men and women of no political leanings, 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Can you play hockey? is all that matters. If you 
say No you are rushed toward a pile of sticks and 
given one and told to go in the forward line; if you 
say Yes you are probably made a vice captain on 
the spot." 

I am frank to confess that this sounds perfectly 
terrible to me. I can't imagine a worse place in 
which to spend a week-end than one where your host 
is always boisterously forcing you to take part in 
games and dances about which you know nothing. 
A week-end guest ought to be ignored, allowed to 
rummage about alone among the books, live stock 
and cold food in the ice-box whenever he feels like 
it, and not rushed willy-nilly (something good could 
be done using the famous Willy-Nilly correspond- 
ence as a base, but not here), into whatever the 
family itself may consider a good time. 

In such a household as the Wells household must 
be you are greeted by your hostess in a robust 
manner with '' So glad you're on time. The match 
begins at two." And when you say '' What match, " 
you are told that there is a little tennis tournament 
on for the week-end and that you and Hank are 
scheduled to start the thing off with a bang. " But 
I haven't played tennis for live years," you protest, 
thinking of the delightful privacy of your own little 

[246] 



A WEEK-END WITH WELLS 

hall bedroom in town. '' Never mind, it will all 
come back to you. Bill has got some extra things 
all put out for you upstairs." So you start off your 
week-end by making a dub of yourself and are 
known from that afternoon on by the people who 
didn't catch your name as " the man who had such 
a funny serve." 

Or if it isn't that, it's dancing. Immediately 
after dinner, just as you are about to settle down 
for a comfortable evening by the fire, you notice 
that they are rolling back the rugs. '^ House-clean- 
ing? " you suggest, with a nervous little laugh. " Oh, 
no, just a little dancing in your honor." And then 
you tell them that your honor will be satisfied 
perfectly without dancing, that you haven't danced 
since you left school, that you don't dance very 
well, or that you have hurt your foot; to which the 
only reply is an encouraging laugh and a hail-fel- 
low-well-met push out into the middle of the floor. 

A pox on both your house parties! 

And yet, in a way, that is just what one might 
expect from Mr. Wells. He has done the same 
thing to me in his books many a time. I personally 
have but little facility for world-repairing. I haven't 
the slightest idea of how one would go about making 
things better. And yet before I am more than two- 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

thirds of the way through '' Joan and Peter " or 
" The Undying Fire " or " The Outline of History/' 
Mr. Wells has me out on the hockey-field waving 
a stick with a magnificent enthusiasm but no aim, 
rushing up and down and calling, " Come on, now! " 
to no one in particular. 

No matter how discouraging things seem when I 
pick up a Wells book, or how averse I may be to 
launching out on a crusade of any sort, I always 
end by walking with a firm step to the door (feeling, 
somehow, that I have grown quite a bit taller and 
much handsomer) and saying quietly: " Meadows, 
my suit of armor, please; the one with a chain-mail 
shirt and a purple plume." 

This, of course, is silly, as any of Mr. Wells's 
critics will tell you. It is the effect that he has on 
irresponsible, visionary minds. But if all the irre- 
sponsible, visionary minds in the world become suffi- 
ciently belligerent through a continued reading of 
Mr. Wells, or even of the New Testament, who 
knows but what they may become just practical 
enough to take a hand at running things? They 
couldn't do much worse than the responsible, prac- 
tical minds have done, now, could they? 



[248] 



XLIX 
ABOUT PORTLAND CEMENT 

PORTLAND cement is " the finely pulverized 
product resulting from the calcination to in- 
cipient fusion of an intimate mixture of properly 
proportioned argillaceous and calcareous materials 
and to which no addition greater than 3 per cent 
has been made subsequent to calcination." 

That, in a word, is the keynote of H. Colin Camp- 
bell's '' How to Use Cement for Concrete Construc- 
tion." In case you should never read any more of 
the book, you would have that. 

But to the reader who is not satisfied with this 
taste of the secret of cement construction and who 
reads on into Mr. Campbell's work, there is revealed 
a veritable mine of information. And in the light 
of the recent turn of events one might even call it 
significant. (Any turn of events will do.) 

The first chapter is given over to a plea for con- 
crete. Judging from the claims made for concrete 
by Mr. Campbell, it will accomplish everything that 
a return to Republican administration would do, 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

and wouldn't be anywhere near so costly. It will 
make your barn fireproof; it will insure clean milk 
for your children; it will provide a safe housing for 
your automobile. Farm prosperity and concrete go 
hand in hand. 

In case there are any other members of society 
who have been with me in thinking that Portland 
cement is a product of Portland, Me., or Portland, 
Ore., it might as well be stated right here and now 
that America had nothing to do with the founding 
of the industry, and that the lucky Portland is an 
island off the south coast of England. 

It was a bright sunny afternoon in May, 1824, 
when Joseph Aspdin, an intelligent bricklayer of 
Leeds, England, was carelessly calcining a mixture 
of limestone and clay, as bricklayers often do on 
their days off, that he suddenly discovered, on re- 
ducing the resulting clinker to a powder, that this 
substance, on hardening, resembled nothing so much 
as the yellowish-gray stone found in the quarries on 
the Isle of Portland. (How Joe knew what grew 
on the Isle of Portland when his home was in Leeds 
is not explained. Maybe he spent his summers at 
the Portland House, within three minutes of the 
bathing beach.) 

At any rate, on discovering the remarkable simi- 
larity between the mess he had cooked up and Port- 

[250] 



ABOUT PORTLAND CEMENT 

land stone, he called to his wife and said: ^'Eunice, 
come here a minute! What does this remind you 
of?" 

The usually cheerful brow of Eunice Aspdin 
clouded for the fraction of a second. 

" That night up at Bert and Edna's? " she ven- 
tured. 

^' No, no, my dear," said the intelligent brick- 
layer, slightly irked. " Anyone could see that this 
here substance is a dead ringer for Portland stone, 
and I am going to make heaps and heaps of it and 
call it ' Portland cement.' It is little enough that I 
can do for the old island." 

And so that's how Portland cement was named. 
Rumor hath it that the first Portland cement in 
America was made at Allentown, Pa., in 1875, but 
I wouldn't want to be quoted as having said that. 
But I will say that the total annual production in 
this country is now over 90,000,000 barrels. 

It is interesting to note that cement is usually 
packed in cloth sacks, although sometimes paper 
bags are used. 

" A charge is made for packing cement in paper 
bags," the books says. " These, of course, are not 
redeemable." 

One can understand their not wanting to take 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

back a paper bag in which cement has been 
wrapped. The wonder is that the bag lasts until 
you get home with it. I tried to take six canta- 
loups home in a paper bag the other night and had 
a bad enough time of it. Cement, w^hen it is in 
good form, must be much worse than cantaloup, and 
the redeemable remnants of the bag must be negli- 
gible. But why charge extra for using paper bags? 
That seems like adding whatever it is you add to 
injury. Apologies, rather than extra charge, should 
be in order. However, I suppose that these ce- 
ment people understand their business. I shall 
know enough to watch out, however, and insist on 
having whatever cement I may be called upon to 
carry home done up in a cloth sack. " Not in a 
paper bag, if you please," I shall say very politely 
to the clerk. 



[252 ] 



L 

OPEN BOOKCASES 

THINGS have come to a pretty pass when a 
man can't buy a bookcase that hasn't got 
glass doors on it. What are we becoming — a na- 
tion of weaklings? 

All over New York city I have been, — trying to 
get something in which to keep books. And what 
am I shown? Curio cabinets, inclosed whatnots, 
museum cases in which to display fragments from 
the neolithic age, and glass-faced sarcophagi for 
dead butterflies. 

"But I am apt to use my books at any time," 
I explain to the salesman. " I never can tell when 
it is coming on me. And when I want a book I 
want it quickly. I don't want to have to send down 
to the office for the key, and I don't want to have 
to manipulate any trick ball-bearings and open up 
a case as if I were getting cream-puffs out for a 
customer. I want a bookcase for books and not 
books for a bookcase." 

(I really don't say all those clever things to the 
clerk. It took me quite a while to think them up. 

[253] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

What I really say is, timidly, " Haven't you any 
bookcases without glass doors? " and when they 
say " No," I thank them and walk into the nearest 
dining-room table.) 

But if they keep on getting arrogant about it I 
shall speak up to them one of these fine days. 
When I ask for an open-faced bookcase they look 
with a scornful smile across the salesroom toward 
the mahogany four-posters and say: 

" Oh, no, we don't carry those any more. We 
don't have any call for them. Every one uses the 
glass-doored ones now. They keep the books much 
cleaner." 

Then the ideal procedure for a real book-lover 
would be to keep his books in the original box, 
snugly packed in excelsior, with the lid nailed down. 
Then they would be nice and clean. And the sun 
couldn't get at them and ruin the bindings. Faugh! 
(Try saying that. It doesn't work out at all as 
you think it's going to. And it makes you feel 
very silly for having tried it.) 

Why, in the elder days bookcases with glass doors 
were owned only by people who filled them with 
ten volumes of a pictorial history of the Civil War 
(including some swell steel engravings), " Walks 

[254] 




I thank them and walk into the nearest dining-room tabh 



OPEN BOOKCASES 

ana Talks with John L. Stoddard " and " Daily 
Thoughts for Daily Needs," done in robin's-egg blue 
with a watered silk bookmark dangling out. A set 
of Sir Walter Scott always helps, fill out a book- 
case with glass doors. It looks well from the front 
and shows that you know good literature when you 
see it. And you don't have to keep opening and 
shutting the doors to get it out, for you never want 
to get it out. 

A bookcase with glass doors used to be a sign 
that somewhere in the room there was a crayon por- 
trait of Father when he was a young man, with a 
real piece of glass stuck on the portrait to represent 
a diamond stud. 

And now we are told that " every one buys book- 
cases with glass doors; we have no call for others." 
Soon we shall be told that the thing to do is to buy 
the false backs of bindings, such as they have in 
stage libraries, to string across behind the glass. 
It will keep us from reading too much, and then, 
too, no one will want to borrow our books. 

But one clerk told me the truth. And I am just 
fearless enough to tell it here. I know that it will 
kill my chances for the Presidency, but I cannqt 
stop to think of that. 

After advising me to have a carpenter build me 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

the kind of bookcase I wanted, and after I had told 
him that I had my name in for a carpenter but 
wasn't due to get him until late in the fall, as he 
was waiting for prices to go higher before taking 
the job on, the clerk said: 

" That's it. It's the price. You see the furni- 
ture manufacturers can make much more money 
out of a bookcase with glass doors than they can 
without. When by hanging glass doors on a piece 
of furniture at but little more expense to them- 
selves they can get a much bigger profit, what's the 
sense in making them without glass doors? They 
have just stopped making them, that's all." 

So you see the American people are being practi- 
cally forced into buying glass doors whether they 
want them or not. Is that right? Is it fair? 
Where is our personal liberty going to? What is 
becoming of our traditional American institutions? 

I don't know. 



[256] 



LI 
TROUT-FISHING 

I NEVER knew very much about trout-fishing 
an3nvay, and I certainly had no inkling that a 
trout-fisher had to be so deceitful until I read 
" Trout-Fishing in Brooks," by G. Garrow-Green. 
The thing is appalling. Evidently the sport is 
nothing but a constant series of compromises with 
one's better nature, what with sneaking about pre- 
tending to be something that one is not, trying to 
fool the fish into thinking one thing when just the 
reverse is true, and in general behaving in an under- 
handed and tricky manner throughout the day. 

The very first and evidently the most important 
exhortation in the book is, " Whatever you do, 
keep out of sight of the fish." Is that open and 
above-board? Is it honorable? 

" Trout invariably lie in running water with their 
noses pointed against the current, and therefore 
whatever general chance of concealment there may 
be rests in fishing from behind them. The moral 
is that the brook-angler must both walk and fish 
upstream." 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

It seems as if a lot of trouble might be saved 
the fisherman, in case he really didn't want to walk 
upstream but had to get to some point downstream 
before 6 o'clock, to adopt some disguise which 
would deceive the fish into thinking that he had 
no intention of catching them anyway. A pair of 
blue glasses and a cane would give the effect of 
the wearer being blind and harmless, and could be 
thrown aside very quickly when the time came to 
show one's self in one's true colors to the fish. If 
there were two anglers they might talk in loud 
tones about their dislike for fish in any form, and 
then, when the trout were quite reassured and swim- 
ming close to the bank they could suddenly be shot 
with a pistol. 

But a little further on comes a suggestion for a 
much more elaborate bit of subterfuge. 

The author says that in the early season trout 
are often engaged with larvae at the bottom and do 
not show on the surface. It is then a good plan, 
he says, to sink the flies well, moving in short jerks 
to imitate nymphs. 

You can see that imitating a n3miph will call for 
a lot of rehearsing, but I doubt very much if moving 
in short jerks is the way in which to go about it. 
I have never actually seen a n3miph, though if I 

[258] 



TROUT-FISHING 

had I should not be likely to admit it, and I can 
think of no possible way in which I could give an 
adequate illusion of being one myself. Even the 
most stupid of trout could easily divine that I was 
masquerading, and then the question would immedi- 
ately arise in its mind : " If he is not a nymph, 
then what is his object in going about like that try- 
ing to imitate one? He is up to no good, I'll be 
bound." 

And crash! away would go the trout before I 
could put my clothes back on. 

There is an interesting note on the care and feed- 
ing of worms on page 67. One hundred and fifty 
worms are placed in a tin and allowed to work 
their way down into packed moss. 

'' A little fresh milk poured in occasionally is 
sufficient food," writes Mr. Garrow-Green, in the 
style of Dr. Holt. '' So disposed, the worms soon 
become bright, lively and tough." 

It is easy to understand why one should want 
to have bright worms, so long as they don't know 
that they are bright and try to show off before 
company, but why deliberately set out to make 
them tough? Good manners they may not be ex- 
pected to acquire, but a worm with a cultivated 
vulgarity sounds intolerable. Imagine 150 very 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

tough worms all crowded together in one tin! 
" Canaille " is the only word to describe it. 

I suppose that it is my ignorance of fishing par- 
lance which makes the following sentence a bit 
hazy: 

'' Much has been written about bringing a fish 
downstream to help drown it, as no doubt it does; 
still, this is often impracticable." 

I can think of nothing more impracticable than 
trying to drown a fish under any conditions, 
upstream or down, but I suppose that Mr. Gar- 
row-Green knows what he is talking about. 

And in at least one of his passages I follow him 
perfectly. In speaking of the time of day for fly- 
fishing in the spring he says: 

^' ^ Carpe diem ' is a good watchword when trout 
are in the humor." At least, I know a good pun 
when I see one. 



[260] 



LII 
"SCOUTING FOR GIRLS" 

a QCOUTING for Girls'^ is not the kind of 
O book you think it is. The verb '' to scout " 
is intransitive in this case. As a matter of fact, 
instead of being a volume of advice to men on how 
to get along with girls, it is full of advice to girls 
on how to get along without men, that is, within 
reason, of course. 

It is issued by the Girl Scouts and is very subtle 
anti-man propaganda. I can't find that men are 
mentioned anywhere in the book. It is given over 
entirely to telling girls how to chop down trees, 
tie knots in ropes, and things like that. Now, as 
a man, I am very jealous of my man's prerogative 
of chopping down trees and tying knots in ropes, 
and I resent the teaching of young girls to usurp 
my province in these matters. Any young girl who 
has taken one lesson in knot-tying will be able to 
make me appear very silly at it. After two lessons 
she could tie me hand and foot to a tree and go 
away with my watch and commutation ticket. And 
then I would look fine, wouldn't I? Small wonder 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

to me that I hail the Girl Scout movement as a 
menace and urge its being nipped in the bud as you 
would nip a viper in the bud. I would not be sur- 
prised if there were Russian Soviet money back of 
it somewhere. 

A companion volume to " Scouting for Girls " is 
" Campward, Ho! " a manual for Girl Scout camps. 
The keynote is sounded on the first page by a 
quotation from Chaucer, beginning: 

" When that Aprille with his schowres 

swoote 
The drought of March hath perced to the 

roote, 
And bathus every veyne in swich licour, 
Of which vertue engendred is the flour" 

One can almost hear the girls singing that of an 
evening as they sit around the camp-fire tying knots 
in ropes. It is really an ideal camping song, be- 
cause even the littlest girls can sing the words with- 
out understanding what they mean. 

But it really lacks the lilt of the " Marching 
Song " printed further on in the book. This is to 
be sung to the tune of " Where Do We Go From 
Here, Boys? " Bear this in mind while humming 
it to yourself: 

[262 ] 



" SCOUTING FOR GIRLS " 

MARCHING SONG 

Where do we go from here, girls, where do 

we go from here? 
Anywhere {our Captain *) leads we'll 

follow, never fear. 
The world is full of dandy girls, but wait 

till we appear — 
Then! 
Girl Scouts, Girl Scouts, give us a hearty 

cheer! 

* Supply Captain's name. 

A very stirring marching song, without doubt, 
but what would they do if the leader's name 
happened to be something like Mary Louise Aber- 
crombie or Elizabeth Van Der Water? They just 
couldn't have a Captain with such a long name, 
that's all. And there you have unfair discrimina- 
tion creeping into your camp right at the start. 

In "Scouting for Girls" there is some useful 
information concerning smoke signals. In case you 
are lost, or want to communicate with your friends 
who are beyond shouting distance, it is much 
quicker than telephoning to build a clear, hot fire 
and cover it with green stuff or rotten wood so that 

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LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

it will send up a solid column of black smoke. By 
spreading and lifting a blanket over this smudge 
the column can be cut up into pieces, long or short 
(this is the way it explains it in the book, but it 
doesn't sound plausible to me), and by a precon- 
certed code these can be made to convey tidings. 

For instance, one steady smoke means " Here 
is camp." 

Two steady smokes mean " I am lost. Come 
and help me." 

Three smokes in a row mean " Good news! " 

I suppose that the Pollyanna of the camping 
party is constantly sending up three smokes in a 
row on the slightest provocation, and then when 
the rest of the outfit have raced across country for 
miles to find out what the good news is she probably 
shows them, with great enthusiasm, that some 
fringed gentians are already in blossom or that the 
flicker's eggs have hatched. Unfortunately, there is 
no smoke code given for snappy replies, but in the 
next paragraph it tells how to carry on a conversa- 
tion with pistol shots. One of these would serve 
the purpose for repartee. 



[264] 



LIII 
HOW TO SELL GOODS 

THE Retail Merchants' Association ought to 
buy up all the copies of '' Elements of Retail 
Salesmanship," by Paul Westley Ivey (Macmillan), 
and not let a single one get into the hands of a 
customer, for once the buying public reads what is 
written there the game is up. It tells all about how 
to sell goods to people, how to appeal to their weak- 
nesses, how to exert subtle influences which will win 
them over in spite of themselves. Houdini might 
as well issue a pamphlet giving in detail his methods 
of escape as for the merchants of this country to 
let this book remain in circulation. 

The art of salesmanship is founded, according to 
Mr. Ivey, on, first, a thorough knowledge of the 
goods which are to be sold, and second, a knowl- 
edge of the customer. By knowing the customer 
you know what line of argument will most appeal 
to him. There are several lines in popular use. 
First is the appeal to the instinct of self-preserva- 
tion — i.e., social self-preservation. The customer 
is made to feel that in order to preserve her social 

[265] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

standing she must buy the article in question. ^' She 
must be made to feel what a disparaged social self 
would mean to her mental comfort." 

It is reassuring to know that it is a recognized 
ruse on the part of the salesman to intimate that 
unless you buy a particular article you will have 
to totter through life branded as the arch-piker. 
I have always taken this attitude of the clerks 
perfectly seriously. In fact, I have worried quite 
a bit about it. 

In the store where I am allowed to buy my clothes 
it is quite the thing among the salesmen to see which 
one of them can degrade me most. They intimate 
that, while they have no legal means of refusing 
to sell their goods to me, it really would be much 
more in keeping with things if I were to take the 
few pennies that I have at my disposal and run 
around the corner to some little haberdashery for 
my shirts and ties. Every time I come out from 
that store I feel like Ethel Barrymore in '' Declas- 
see." Much worse, in fact, for I haven't any 
good looks to fall back upon. 

But now that I know the clerks are simply acting 
all that scorn in an attempt to appeal to my in- 
stinct for the preservation of my social self, I can 
face them without flinching. When that pompous 

[266] 




They intimate that I liad better take my few pennies and 
run 'round the corner to some little haberdashery. 



HOW TO SELL GOODS 

old boy with the sandy mustache who has always 
looked upon me as a member of the degenerate Juke 
family tries to tell me that if I don't take the 
five-dollar cravat he won't be responsible for the 
way in which decent people will receive me when 
I go out on the street, I will reach across the coun- 
ter and playfully pull his own necktie out from 
his waistcoat and scream, " I know you, you old 
rascal! You got that stuff from page 68 of 'Ele- 
ments of Retail Salesmanship' (Macmillan)." 

Other traits which a salesperson may appeal to 
in the customer are: Vanity, parental pride, greed, 
imitation, curiosity and selfishness. One really 
gets in touch with a lot of nice people in this work 
and can bring out the very best that is in them. 

Customers are divided into groups indicative of 
temperament. There is first the Impulsive or 
Nervous Customer. She is easily recognized be- 
cause she walks into the store in " a quick, some- 
times jerky manner. Her eyes are keen-looking; 
her expression is intense, oftentimes appearing 
strained." She must be approached promptly, ac- 
cording to the book, and what she desires must be 
quickly ascertained. Since these are the rules for 
selling to people who enter the store in this manner, 
it might be well, no matter how lethargic you may 

[267] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

be by nature, to assume the appearance of the Im- 
pulsive or Nervous Customer as soon as you enter 
the store, adopting a quick, even jerky manner and 
making your eyes as keen-looking as possible, with 
an intense expression, oftentimes appearing strained. 
Then the clerk will size you up as type No. i and 
will approach you promptly. After she has quickly 
filled your order you may drop the impulsive pose 
and assume your natural, slow manner again, where- 
upon the clerk will doubtless be highly amused at 
having been so cleverly fooled into giving quick 
service. 

The opposite type is known as the Deliberate 
Customer. She walks slowly and in a dignified 
manner. Her facial expression is calm and poised. 
'' Gestures are uncommon, but if existing tend to 
be slow and inconspicuous." She can wait. 

Then there is the Vacillating or Indecisive Cus- 
tomer, the Confident or Decisive Customer (this 
one should be treated with subtle flattery and agree- 
ment with all her views), the Talkative or Friendly 
Customer, and the Silent or Indifferent one. All 
these have their little weaknesses, and the perfect 
salesperson will learn to know these and play to 
them. 

There seems to be only one thing left for the 

[268] 



HOW TO SELL GOODS 

customer to do in order to meet this concerted 
attack upon his personality. That is, to hire some 
expert like Mr. Ivey to study the different types of 
sales men and women and formulate methods of 
meeting their offensive. Thus, if I am of the type 
designated as the Vacillating or Indecisive Cus- 
tomer, I ought to know what to do when confronted 
by a salesman of the Aristocratic, Scornful type, so 
that I may not be bulldozed into buying something 
I do not want. 

If I could only find such a book of instructions 
I would go tomorrow and order a black cotton 
engineer's shirt from that sandy-mustached sales- 
man and bawl him out if he raised his eyebrows. 
But not having the book, I shall go in and, without 
a murmur, buy a $3 silk shirt for $18 and slink out 
feeling that if I had been any kind of sport at all 
I would also have bought that cork helmet in the 
showcase. 



[269] 



LIV 
"YOU!" 

IN the window of the grocery store to which I 
used to be sent after a pound of Mocha and 
Java mixed and a dozen of your best oranges, there 
was a cardboard figure of a clerk in a white coat 
pointing his finger at the passers-by. As I re- 
member, he was accusing you of not taking home 
a bottle of Moxie, and pretty guilty it made you 
feel too. 

This man was, I believe, the pioneer in what has 
since become a great literary movement. He 
founded the "You, Mr. Business-Man! " school of 
direct appeal. It is strictly an advertising property 
and has long been used to sell merchandise to people 
who never can resist the flattery of being addressed 
personally. When used as an advertisement it is 
usually accompanied by an illustration built along 
the lines of the pioneer grocery-clerk, pointing a 
virile finger at you from the page of the magazine, 
and putting the whole thing en a personal basis by 
addressing you as " You, Mr. Rider-in-the-Open- 

[270] 



"YOU! " 

Cars! " or " You, Mr. Wearer-of-i4i-Shirts! " The 
appeal is instantaneous. 

In straight reading-matter, bound in book form 
and sold as literature, this Moxie talk becomes a 
volume of inspirational sermonizing, and instead of 
selling cooling drinks or warming applications, it 
throws dynamic paragraph after dynamic paragraph 
into the fight for efficiency, concentration, self- 
confidence and personality on the part of our body 
politic. A homely virtue such as was taught us at 
our mother's knee (or across our mother's knees) 
at the age of four, in a dozen or so simple words, 
is taken and blown up into a book in which it is 
stated very impressively in a series of short, snappy 
sentences, all saying the same thing. 

Such a book is called, for instance " You," writ- 
ten by Irving R. Allen. 

"You" takes 275 pages to divulge a secret of 
success. It would not be fair to Mr. Allen to give 
it away here after he has spent so much time con- 
cealing it. But it might be possible to give some 
idea of the importance of Mr. Allen's discovery by 
stating one of my own, somewhat in the manner in 
which he has stated his. I will give my little con- 
tribution to the world's inspiration the title of 

[271] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

HEY, YOU! 

You and I are alone. 

No, don't try to get away. That door is locked. 
I won't hurt you — much. 

What I want to do is make you see yourself. 
I want you, when you put down this book, to say, 
" I know myself! " I want you to be able to look 
at yourself in the mirror and say: '^ Why, certainly 
I remember you, Mr. Addington Simms of Seattle, 
you old Rotary Club dog! How's your merger? " 

And the only way that you can ever be able to 
do this is to read this book through. 

Then read it through again. 

Then read it through again. 

Then ring Dougherty's bell and ask for " Ches- 
ter." 

Now let's get down to business. 

I knew a man once who had made a million 
dollars. If he hadn't been arrested he would have 
made another million. 

Do you see what I mean? 

If not, go back and read that over a second 
time. It's worth it. I wrote it for you to read. 
You, do you hear me? You! 

If you want to know the secret of this man's 
success, of the success of hundreds of other men 

[272 ] 



"YOU!" 

just like him, if you want to make his success your 
success, you must first learn the rule. 

What is this rule? you may ask. 

Go ahead and ask it. 

Very well, since you ask. 

It is a rule which has kept J. P. Morgan what he 
is. It is a rule which gives John D. Rockefeller 
the right to be known as the Baptist man alive. 
It is a rule which is responsible for the continued 
existence of every successful man of today. 

And now I am going to tell it to you. 

You, the you that you know, the real you, are 
going to learn the secret. 

Can you bear it? 

Here it is: 

You can't win if you breathe under water. 

Read that again. 

Read it backward. 

It may sound simple to you now. You may say 
to yourself, " What do you take me for, a baby 
boy? " 

Well, you paid good money for this book, didn't 
you? 



[273] 



LV 

THE CATALOGUE SCHOOL 

WITHOUT wishing in the least to detract 
from the praise due to Sinclair Lewis for 
the remarkable accuracy with which he reports de- 
tails in his " Main Street," it is interesting to specu- 
late on how other books might have read had their 
authors had Mr. Lewis's flair for minutiae and their 
publishers enough paper to print the result. 

For instance, Carol Kennicott, the heroine, when- 
ever she is overtaken by an emotional scene, is 
given to looking out at the nearest window to hide 
her feelings, whereupon the author goes to great 
lengths to describe just exactly what came within 
her range of vision. Nothing escapes him, even to 
shreds of excelsior lying on the ground in back of 
Rowland & Gould's grocery store. 

Let us suppose that Harriet Beecher Stowe had 
been endowed with Mr. Lewis's gift for reporting 
and had indulged herself in it to the extent of the 
following in ^' Uncle Tom's Cabin: " 

^' Slowly Simon Legree raised his whip-arm to 

[274] 



THE CATALOGUE SCHOOL 

strike the prostrate body of the old negro. As he 
did so his eye wandered across the plantation to the 
slaves' quarters which crouched blistering in the 
sun. Cowed as they were, as only ramshackle build- 
ings can be cowed, they presented their gray 
boards, each eaten with four or five knot-holes, to 
the elements in abject submission. The door of one 
hung loose by a rust-encased hinge, of which only 
one screw remained on duty, and that by sheer will- 
power of two or three threads. Legree could not 
quite make out how many threads there were on 
the screw, but he guessed, and Simon Legree's guess 
was nearly always right. On the ground at the 
threshold lay a banjo G string, curled like a blond 
snake ready to strike at the reddish, brown inner 
husk of a nut of some sort which was blowing about 
within reach. There were also several crumbs of 
corn-pone, well-done, a shred of tobacco which had 
fallen from the pipe of some negro slave before the 
fire had consumed more than its very tip, an old 
shoe which had, Legree noticed by the maker's 
name, been bought in Boston in its palmier days, 
doubtless by a Yankee cousin of one of Uncle 
Tom's former owners, and an indiscriminate pile of 
old second editions of a Richmond newspaper, 
sweet-potato peelings and seeds of unripe water- 
melons. 

[275] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

"Swish! The blow descended on the crouching 
form of Uncle Tom.'' 

Or Sir Walter Scott: 

" Sadly Rowena turned from her lover's side and 
looked out over the courtyard of the castle. Be- 
neath her she saw the cobble-stones all scratched 
and marred with gray bruises from the horses' hoofs, 
a faded purple ribbon dropped from the mandolin 
of a minstrel, three slightly imperfect wassails and 
a trencher with a nick on the rim, all that had not 
been used of the wild boar at last night's feast, a 
peach-stone like a wrinkled almond nestling in a 
sardine tin. Slowly she faced her knight: 

" ' Prithee,' she said." 

And I am not at all sure that " Uncle Tom's 
Cabin " and '' Ivanhoe " wouldn't have made better 
reading if they had lapsed into the photographic at 
times. Mr. Lewis may overdo it, but I expect to 
re-read " Main Street " some day, and that is more 
encouragement than I can hold out to Mrs. Stowe 
or Sir Walter Scott. 



[276] 



LVI 
"EFFECTIVE HOUSE ORGANS" 

TO the hurrying commuter as he waits for his 
two cents change at the news stand it looks as 
if all the periodicals in the United States were on 
display there, none of which he ever has quite 
time enough to buy. It seems incredible that there 
should be presses enough in the country to print 
all the matter that he sees hanging from wires, piled 
on the counter and dangling from clips over the 
edge, to say nothing of his conceiving of there being 
other periodicals in circulation which he never even 
hears about. But any one knowing the commuter 
well enough to call him " dearie " might tell him 
in slightly worn vernacular that he doesn't know 
the half of it. 

One cannot get a true idea of the amount of side- 
line printing that is done in this country without 
reading " Effective House Organs," written by 
Robert E. Ramsay. The mass effect of this book 
is appalling. Page after page of clear-cut illustra- 
tions show reproductions of hundreds and hundreds 
of house-organ covers and give the reader a hope- 

[277] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

less sensation of going down for the third time. 
Such names as " Gas Logic," " Crane-ing," '' Hid- 
den's Hints," "The Y. and E. Idea," "Vim," 
"Tick Talk" and "The Smileage " show that 
Yankee ingenuity has invaded the publishing field, 
which means that the literature of business is on 
its way to becoming the literature of the land. 

For those who are so illiterate as not to be fa- 
miliar with the literature of business, I quote a 
definition of the word " house organ ": 

" A house magazine or bulletin to dealers, cus- 
tomers or employees, designed to promote good- 
will, increase sales, induce better salesmanship or 
develop better profits." 

In spite of Mr. Ramsay's exceedingly thorough 
treatment of his subject, there is one type of house 
organ to which he devotes much too little space. 
This is the so-called " employee or internal house 
organ " and is designed to keep the help happy and 
contented with their lot and to spur them on to 
extra effort in making it a banner year for the 
stockholders. The possibilities of this sort of house 
organ in the solution of the problem of industrial 
unrest are limitless. 

Publications for light reading among employees 
are usually called by such titles as " Diblee Do- 

[278] 



" EFFECTIVE HOUSE ORGANS " 

ings," " Tinkham Topics/' " The Mooney and Car- 
miechal Machine Lather " or " Better Belting 
News." 

First of all, they carry news notes of happenings 
among the employees, so that a real spirit of co- 
operation and team-play may be fostered. These 
news notes include such as the following: 

" Eddie Lingard of the Screen Room force, was 
observed last Saturday evening between the mystic 
hours of six-thirty with a certain party from the 
Shipping Room, said party in a tan knit sweater, 
on their way to Ollie's. Come, 'fess up, Eddie! " 

" Everyone is wondering who the person is who 
put chocolate peppermints in some of the girls' 
pockets while they were hanging in the Girls' Rest 
Room Thursday afternoon, it being so hot that 
they melted and practically ruined some of their 
clothing. Some folks have a funny sense of 
humor." 

Then there are excerpts from speeches made by 
the Rev. Charles Aubrey Eaton and young Mr. 
Rockefeller or by the President and Treasurer of the 
Diamond Motor Sales Corporation, saying, in part: 

" The man who makes good in any line of work 
is the man who gives the best there is in him. He 
doesn't watch the clock. He doesn't kick when he 

[279] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

fails to get that raise that he may have expected. 
He just digs into the job harder and makes the 
dust fly. And when some one comes along waiving 
a red flag and tries to make him stop work and 
strike for more money, he turns on the agitator and 

says : ' You get the h out of here. I know my 

job better than you do. I know my boss better 
than you do, and I know that he is going to give 
me the square deal just as soon as he can see his 
way clear to do it. And in the mean time I am 
going to WORK! ' 

" That is the kind of man who makes good." 

And then there are efficiency contests, with the 
force divided into teams trying to see which one 
can wrap the most containers or stamp the largest 
number of covers in the week. The winning team 
gets a felt banner and their names are printed in 
full in that week's issue of " Pep " or " Nosey 
News." 

And biographies of employees who have been with 
the company for more than fifty years, with photo- 
graphs, and a little notice written by the Super- 
intendent saying that this will show the company's 
appreciation of Mr. Gomble's loyal and unswerving 
allegiance to his duty, implying that any one else 
who does his duty for fifty years will also get his 

[280] 



" EFFECTIVE HOUSE ORGANS " 

picture in the paper and a notice by the 
Superintendent. 

It will easily be seen how this sort of house 
organ can be made to promote good feeling and 
esprit de corps among the help. If only more con- 
cerns could be prevailed upon to bring this message 
of weekly or monthly good cheer to their em- 
ployees, who knows but what the whole caldron of 
industrial unrest might not suddenly simmer down 
to mere nothingness? It has been said that all that 
is necessary is for capital and labor to understand 
each other. Certainly such a house organ helps 
the employees to understand their employers. 

Perhaps some one will start a house organ edited 
by the employees for circulation among the bosses, 
containing newsy notes about the owners' families, 
quotations from Karl Marx and the results of the 
profit-sharing contest between the various mills of 
the district. 

This would complete the circle of under- 
standing. 



[281] 



T 



LVII 
ADVICE TO WRITERS 

WO books have emerged from the hundreds 
that are being published on the art of writing. 
One of them is " The Lure of the Pen," by Flora 
Klickmann, and the other is '^ Learning to Write," 
a collection of Stevenson's meditations on the sub- 
ject, issued by Scribners. At first glance one might 
say that the betting would be at least eight to one 
on Stevenson. But for real, solid, sensible advice 
in the matter of writing and selling stories in the 
modern market. Miss Klickmann romps in an easy 
winner. 

It must be admitted that John William Rogers 
Jr., who collected the Stevenson material, warns 
the reader in his introduction that the book is not 
intended to serve as '^ a macadamized, mile-posted 
road to the secret of writing," but simxply as a help 
to those who want to write and who are interested 
to know how Stevenson did it. So we mustn't com- 
pare it too closely with Miss Klickmann's book, 
which is quite frankly a mile-posted road, with 
little sub-headings along the side of the page such 

[282 ] 



ADVICE TO WRITERS 

as we used to have in Fiske's Elementary American 
History. But Miss Klickmann will save the editors 
of the country a great deal more trouble than 
Stevenson's advice ever will. She is the editor of 
an English magazine herself, and has suffered. 

Where Miss Klickmann enumerates the pitfalls 
which the candidate must avoid and points out 
qualities which every good piece of writing should 
have, Stevenson writes a delightful essay on " The 
Profession of Letters " or " A Gossip on Romance." 
These essays are very inspiring. They are too 
inspiring. They make the reader feel that he can 
go out and write like Stevenson. And then a lot 
of two-cent stamps are wasted and a lot more editors 
are cross when they get home at night. 

On the other hand, the result of Miss Klick- 
mann's book is to make the reader who feels a 
writing spell coming on stop and give pause. He 
finds enumerated among the horrors of manuscript- 
reading several items which he was on the point 
of injecting into his own manuscript with con- 
siderable pride. He may decide that the old job 
in the shipping-room isn't so bad after all, with 
its little envelope coming in regularly every week. 
As a former member of the local manuscript- 
readers' union, I will give one of three rousing cheers 

[ 283 ] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

for any good work that Miss Klickmann may do 
in this field. One writer kept very busy at work 
in the shipping-room every day is a victory for 
literature. I used to have a job in a shipping-room 
myself, so I know. 

If, for instance, the subject under discussion were 
that of learning to skate, Miss Klickmann might 
advise as follows: 

1. Don't try to skate if your ankles are weak. 

2. Get skates that fit you. A skate which can't 
be put on when you get to the pond, or one which 
drags behind your foot by the strap, is worse than 
no skate at all. 

3. If you are sure that you are ready, get on your 
feet and skate. 

On the same subject, Scribners might bring to 
light something that Stevenson had written to a 
young friend about to take his first lesson in 
skating, reading as follows: 

" To know the secret of skating is, indeed, I 
have always thought, the beginning of winter-long 
pleasance. It comes as sweet deliverance from the 
tedium of indoor isolation and brings exhilaration, 
now with a swift glide to the right, now with a 
deft swerve to the left, now with a deep breath of 
healthy air, now with a long exhalation of ozone, 

[284] 



ADVICE TO WRITERS 

which the lungs, like greedy misers, have cast aside 
after draining it of its treasure. But it is not health 
that we love nor exhilaration that we seek, though 
we may think so; our design and our sufficient re- 
ward is to verify our own existence, say what you 
will. 

" And so, my dear young friend, I would say to 
you: Open up your heart; sing as you skate; sing 
inharmoniously if you will, but sing! A man may 
skate with all the skill in the world; he may glide 
forward with incredible deftness and curve back- 
ward with divine grace, and yet if he be not master 
of his emotions as well as of his feet, I would say 
— and here Fate steps in — that he has failed." 

There is, of course, plenty of good advice in the 
Stevenson book. But it is much better as pure 
reading matter than as advice to the young idea or 
even the middle-aged idea. It may have been all 
right for Stevenson to " play the sedulous ape " and 
consciously imitate the style of Hazlitt, Lamb, 
Montaigne and the rest, but if the rest of lis were 
to try it there would result a terrible plague of 
insufferably artificial and affected authors, all play- 
ing the sedulous ape and all looking the part. 

On the whole, the Stevenson book makes good 
reading and Miss Klickmann gives good advice. 

[285] 



LVIII 

"THE EFFECTIVE SPEAKING 
VOICE " 

JOSEPH A. MOSHER begins his book on " The 
Effective Speaking Voice" by saying: 

" Among the many developments of the great war 
was a widespread activity in public speaking." 

Mr. Mosher, to adopt a technical term of elocu- 
tion, has said a mouthful. WTiatever else the war 
did for us, it raised overnight an army of public 
speakers among the civilian population, many of 
whom seem not yet to have received their discharge. 
It is the aim of Mr. Mosher's book to keep this 
Landwehr in fighting trim and aid in recruiting its 
ranks, possibly against the next war. Until every 
nation on earth has subjected its public speakers 
to a devastating operation on the larynx no true 
disarmament can be said to have taken place. 

In the first place there are exercises which must 
be performed by the man who would have an effec- 
tive speaking voice, exercises similar to Walter 
Camp's Daily Dozen. You stand erect, with the 

[286] 



" THE EFFECTIVE SPEAKING VOICE " 

chest held moderately high. (Moderation in all 
things is the best rule to follow, no matter what 
you are doing.) Place the thumbs just above the 
hips, with the fingers forward over the waist to 
note the muscular action. Then you inhale and 
exhale and make the sound of " ah '^ and the sound 
of '' ah-oo-oh," and, if you aren't self-conscious, you 
say " wah-we-wi-wa," slowly, ten or a dozen times. 
" The student should stop at once if signs of 
dizziness appear," says the book, but it does not 
say whether the symptoms are to be looked for in 
the student himself or in the rest of the family. 

The author does the public a rather bad turn 
when he suggests to student speakers that, under 
stress, they might use what is known as the " oro- 
tund." The orotund quality in public speaking is 
saved for passages containing grandeur of thought, 
when the orator feels the need of a larger, fuller, 
more resonant and sounding voice to be in keeping 
with the sentiment. Its effect is somewhat that of 
a chant, and here is how you do it: 

The chest is raised and tensed, the cavities of the 
mouth and pharynx are enlarged, more breath is 
directed into the nasal chambers and the lips are 
opened more widely to give free passage to the in- 
creased volume of voice. 

[ 287 ] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

The effectiveness of the orotund might be some- 
what reduced if the audience knew the conscious 
mechanical processes which went to make it up. Or 
if, in the Congressional Record, instead of (laughter 
and applause) the vocal technique of the orator 
could be indicated, how few would be the wars into 
which impassioned Senators could plunge us! For 
example, Mr. Thurston's plea for intervention in 
Cuba: 

" The time for action has come. (Tensing the 
chest.) No greater reason for it can exist tomorrow 
than exists today. (Enlarging the cavities of the 
mouth.) Every hour's delay only adds another 
chapter to the awful story of misery and death. 
(Enlarging the cavities of the pharynx.) Only one 
power can intervene — the United States of Amer- 
ica. (Directing more breath into the nasal cham- 
bers.) Ours is the one great nation of the New 
World — the mother of republics. (Elevating the 
diaphragm.) We cannot refuse to accept this re- 
sponsibility which the God of the Universe has 
placed upon us as the one great power in the New 
World. We must act! (Raising the tongue and 
thrusting it forward so that the edges of the blade 
are pressed against the upper grinders.) What 
shall our action be? (Lifting the voice-box very 
high and the edges of the tongue blade against the 

[288] 



" THE EFFECTIVE SPEAKING VOICE " 

soft palate, leaving only a small central groove for 
the passage of air.) " 

The aspirate quality, or whisper, is very effective 
when well handled, and the book gives a few exer- 
cises for practice's sake. Try whispering a few of 
them, if you are sure that you are alone in the 
room. You will sound very silly if you are over- 
heard. 

a. ^' I can't tell just how it happened; I think 
the beam fell on me." 

b. " Keep back; wait till I see if the coast is 
clear." 

c. '' Ask the man next to you if he'll let me see 
his programme." 

d. "Hark! What was that? " 

e. " It's too steep — he'll never make it — oh, 
this is terrible! " 

For the cheery evening's reading, if you happen 
to be feeling low in your mind, let me recommend 
that section of " The Effective Speaking Voice " 
which deals with " the Subdued Range." The se- 
lections for the practice-reading include the follow- 
ing well-known nuggets in lighter vein: 

" The Wounded Soldier," " The Death of Molly 
Cass," " The Little Cripple's Garden," " The Burial 

[289] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

of Little Nell," '' The Light of Other Days/' "The 
Baby is Dead," " King David Mourns for Absa- 
lom," and '' The Days That Are No More." 

After all, a good laugh never does anyone any 
harm. 



[290] 



LIX 

THOSE DANGEROUSLY DYNAMIC 
BRITISH GIRLS 

IT is difficult to get into Rose Macaulay's " Dan- 
gerous Ages " once you discover that it is going 
to be about another one of those offensively healthy 
English families. Ever since '' Mr. Britling '' we 
have been deluged with accounts from overseas of 
whole droves of British brothers and sisters, mothers 
and fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, who 
all get out at six in the morning and play hockey 
all over the place. Each has some strange, intimate 
name like " Bim," or '' Pleda,'' or '' Goots," and 
you can never tell which are the brothers and which 
the sisters until they begin to have children along in 
the tenth or eleventh chapter. 

In ^' Dangerous Ages '' they swim. Dozens of 
them, all in the same family, go splashing in at 
once and persist in calling out health slogans to one 
another across the waves. There are Neville and 
Rodney and Gerda and Kay, and one or two very 
old ladies whose relationship to the rest of the clan 
is never very definitely established. Grandma, for 

[291 ] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

some reason or other, doesn't go in swimming that 
day, doubtless because she had already been in be- 
fore breakfast and her suit wasn't dry. 

These dynamic British girls are always full of 
ruddy health and current information. They go 
about kidding each other on the second reading of 
the Home Rule bill or fooling in their girlish way 
about the chances of the Labor candidate in the 
coming Duncastershire elections. It is getting so 
that no novel of British life will be complete without 
somewhere in its pages a scene like the following: 

" A chance visitor at The Beetles some autumn 
morning along about five o'clock might have been 
surprised to see a trail of dog-trotting figures wind- 
ing their way heatedly across the meadow. No 
one but a chance visitor would be surprised, how- 
ever, for it was well known to invited guests that 
the entire Willetts family ran cross-country down 
to the outskirts of London and back every morning 
before breakfast, a matter of fourteen miles. In 
the lead was, of course. Dungeon in running cos- 
tume, followed closely by the flaxen-haired Mid 
and snub-nosed Boola, then Arlix and Linny, striv- 
ing valiantly for fourth place but not reckoning on 
the fleet-footed Meeda, who was no longer content 
to hobble in the vanguard with Grandpa Willetts 
and Grandpa's old mother, who still insisted on 

[292 ] 




"Why didn't you tell us that you were reading a paper on 

birth control?" 



THOSE DYNAMIC BRITISH GIRLS 

cross-country running, although she had long since 
been put on the retired list at the Club. 

" * Oh, Linny/ called out Dungeon over her 
shoulder, 'you young minx! Why didn't you tell 
us that you were reading a paper on Birth Control 
at the next meeting of the Spiddix? Twiller just told 
me today. It's too ripping of you! " 

" * Silly goose,' panted Linny, stumbling over a 
hedgerow, ' how about what the vicar said the other 
night about your inferiority complex? It was toppo, 
and you know it.' 

" ' It won't be long now before we'll have 
disenfranchisement through, anyway,' muttered 
Grandpa Willetts, crashing down into a stone 
quarry, at which exhibition of reaction a loud chorus 
of laughter went up from the entire family, who by 
this time had reached Nogroton and were bursting 
with health." 



[293] 



LX 

BOOKS AND OTHER THINGS 

FOR those to whom the purple-and-gold filigreed 
covers of Florence L. Barclay's books bring a 
stirring of the sap and a fluttering of the susceptible 
heart, " Returned Empty " comes as a languorous 
relief from the stolid realism of most present-day 
writing. One reads it and swoons. And on opening 
one's eyes again, one hears old family retainers mur- 
muring in soft retentive accents: '^ Here, sip some 
of this, my lord; 'twill bring the roses back to 
those cheeks and the strength to those poor limbs." 
It's elegant, that's all there is to it, elegant. 

^'Returned Empty " was the inscription on the 
wrappings which enfolded the tiny but aristocratic 
form of a man-child left on the steps of the Found- 
lings Institution one moonless October night. There 
was also some reference to Luke, xii., 6, which in 
return refers to five sparrows sold for two farthings. 
What more natural, then, than for the matron to 
name the little one Luke Sparrow? 

[294] 



BOOKS AND OTHER THINGS 

Luke was an odd boy but refined. So odd that 
he used to go about looking in at people's windows 
when they forgot to pull down the shades, and so 
refined that he never wished to be inside with them. 

But one night, when he was thirty years old, he 
looked in at the window of a very refined and ele- 
gant mansion and saw a woman. In the simple 
words of the author, " in court or cottage alike she 
would be queen." That's the kind of woman she 
was. 

And what do you think? She saw Luke looking 
in. Not only saw him but came over to the window 
and told him that she had been expecting him. Well, 
you could have knocked Luke over with a feather. 
However, he allowed himself to be ushered in by 
the butler (everything in the house was elegant 
like that) and up to a room where he found evening 
clothes, bath-salts and grand things of that nature. 
On passing a box of books which stood in the hall 
he read the name on it " before he realized what 
he was doing." Of course the minute he thought 
what an unrefined thing it was to do he stopped, 
but it was too late. He had already seen that his 
hostess's name was " Lady Tintagel." 

When later he met her down in the luxurious 
dining-room she was just as refined as ever. And 
so was he. They both were so refined that she had 

[295] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

to tell the butler to ^' serve the fruit in the Oak 
Room, Thomas." 

Once in the Oak Room she told him her strange 
tale. It seemed that he was her husband. He didn't 
remember it, but he was. He had been drowned 
some years before and she had wished so hard that 
he might come back to life that finally he 
had been born again in the body of Luke Sparrow. 
It's funny how things work out like that sometimes. 

But Luke, who, as has been said before, was 
an odd boy, took it very hard and said that he didn't 
want to be brought back to life. Not even when 
she told him that his name was now Sir Nigel Guido 
Cadross Tintagel, Bart. He became very cross and 
said that he was going out and drown himself all 
over again, just to show her that she shouldn't have 
gone meddling with his spirit life. He was too re- 
fined to say so, but when you consider that he was 
just thirty, and his wife, owing to the difference in 
time between the spirit world and this, had gone on 
growing old until she was now pushing sixty, he had 
a certain amount of justice on his side. But of 
course she was Lady Tintagel, and all the lovers of 
Florence Barclay will understand that that is some- 
thing. 

So, after reciting Tennyson's " Crossing the Bar," 

[296] 



BOOKS AND OTHER THINGS 

at her request (credit is given in the front of the 
book for the use of this poem, and only rightly too, 
for without it the story could never have been writ- 
ten), he goes out into the ocean. But there — we 
mustn^t give too much of the plot away. All that 
one need know is that Luke or Sir Nigel, as you 
wish (and what reader of Florence Barclay wouldn't 
prefer Sir Nigel?), was so cultured that he said, 
" Nobody in the whole world knows it, save you and 
I," and referred to " flotsam and jetson " as he 
was swimming out into the path of the rising sun. 
" Jetsam " is such an ugly word. 

It is only fitting that on his tombstone Lady Tin- 
tagel should have had inscribed an impressive and 
high-sounding misquotation from the Bible. 



[297] 



LXI 
"MEASURE YOUR MIND" 

MEASURE Your Mind" by M. R. Traube 
and Frank Parker Stockbridge, is apt 
to be a very discouraging book if you have any 
doubt at all about your own mental capacity. From 
a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it 
out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating 
" Low Average Ability/' reserved usually for those 
just learning to speak the English language and 
preparing for a career of holding a spike while 
another man hits it. If they ever adopt the " menti- 
meter tests " on this journal I shall last just about 
forty-five minutes. 

And the trouble is that each test starts off so 
easily. You begin to think that you are so good 
that no one has ever appreciated you. There is for 
instance, a series of twenty-four pictures (very 
badly drawn too, Mr. Frank Parker Stockbridge. 
You think you are so smart, picking flaws with 
people's intelligence. If I couldn't draw a better 
head than the one on page 131 I would throw up 
the whole business). At any rate, in each one of 

[298] 



" MEASURE YOUR MIND " 

these pictures there is something wrong (wholly 
apart from the drawing). You are supposed to 
pick out the incongruous feature, and you have i8o 
seconds in which to tear the twenty-four pictures 
to pieces. 

The first one is easy. The rabbit has one human 
ear. In the second one the woman's eye is in her 
hair. Pretty soft, you say to yourself. In the 
third the bird has three legs. It looks like a cinch. 
Following in quick succession come a man with his 
mouth in his forehead, a horse with cow's horns, a 
mouse with rabbit's ears, etc. You will have time 
for a handspring before your i8o seconds are up. 

But then they get tricky. There is a post-card 
with a stamp upside down. Well, what's wrong 
with that? Certainly there is no affront to nature 
in a stamp upside down. Neither is there in a 
man's looking through the large end of a telescope if 
he wants to. You can't arbitrarily say at the top of 
the page, "Mark the thing that is wrong," and then 
have a picture of a house with one window larger 
than all the others and expect any one to agree 
with you that it is necessarily wrong. It may look 
queer, but so does the whole picture. You can't 
tell; the big window may open from a room 
that needs a big window. I am not going to stultify 

[299I 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

myself by making things wrong about which I 
know none of the facts. Who am I that I should 
condemn a man for looking through the large end 
of a telescope? Personally, I like to look through 
the large end of a telescope. It only shows the 
state of personal liberty in this country when a pic- 
ture of a man looking at a ship through the large 
end of a telescope is held before the young and 
branded as ^' wrong." 

Arguing these points with yourself takes up quite 
a bit of time and you get so out of patience with the 
man that made up the examination that you lose 
all heart in it. 

Then come some pictures about which I am 
frankly in the dark. There is a Ford car with a 
rather funny-looking mud-guard, but who can pick 
out any one feature of a Ford and say that it is 
wrong? It may look wrong but I'll bet that the 
car in this picture as it stands could pass many a 
big car on a hill. 

Then there is a boy holding a bat, and while his 
position isn't all that a coach could ask, the only 
radically wrong thing that I can detect about the 
picture is that he is evidently playing baseball in a 
clean white shirt with a necktie and a rather natty 
cap set perfectly straight on his head. It is true 

[300] 



" MEASURE YOUR MIND " 

he has his right thumb laid along the edge of the 
bat, but maybe he likes to bunt that way. There is 
something in the picture that I don't get, I am 
afraid, just as there is in the picture of two men 
playing golf. One is about to putt. Aside from the 
fact that his putter seems just a trifle long, I should 
have to give up my guess and take my defeat like 
a man. 

But I do refuse to concede anything on Picture 
No. 22. Here a baby is shown sitting on the floor. 
He appears to be about a year and a half old. In- 
cidentally, he is a very plain baby. Strewn about 
him on the floor are the toys that he has been play- 
ing with. There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, 
a bell and a pair of roller-skates. Evidently, the 
candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller- 
skates in the possession of such a small child. 

The man who drew that picture had evidently 
never furnished playthings for a small child. I can 
imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year 
and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew 
and spin and hit himself in the face with. They 
could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was 
lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable. Of 
all the toys arranged before the child, the roller- 
skates are the most logical. I suppose that the 
author of this test would insist on calling a picture 

[301 ] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

wrong which showed a baiby with a safety-razor in 
his hand or an overshoe on his head, and yet a photo- 
graph of the Public Library could not be more true 
to life. 

That is my great trouble in taking tests and ex- 
aminations of any kind. I always want to argue 
with the examiner, because the examiner is always 
so obviously wrong. 



[302 ] 



LXII 

THE BROW-ELEVATION IN 
HUMOR 

AFTER an author has been dead for some time, 
it becomes increasingly difficult for his pub- 
lishers to get out a new book by him each year. 
Without recourse to the ouija board, Harper & 
Brothers manage to do very well by Mark Twain, 
considering that all they have to work with are the 
books that he wrote when he was alive. Each year 
we get something from the pen of the famous hu- 
morist, even though the ink has faded slightly. An 
introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine and a hitherto 
unpublished photograph as a frontspiece, and there 
you are — the season's new Mark Twain book. 

This season it is " Moments With Mark Twain," 
a collection of excerpts from his works for quick 
and handy reading. We may look for further books 
in this series in 1923, 1924, 1925, &c., to be entitled 
"Half Hours With Mark Twain" (the selections 
a trifle longer), "Pleasant Week-Ends With Mark 
Twain," " Indian Summer With Mark Twain," &c. 

[ 303 ] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

There is an interesting comparison between this 
sample bottle of the humor of Mark Twain and that 
contained in the volume entitled " Something Else 
Again," by Franklin P. Adams. The latter is a vol- 
ume of verse and burlesques which have appeared 
in the newspapers and magazines. 

In the days when Mark Twain was writing, it 
was considered good form to spoof not only the 
classics but surplus learning of any kind. A man 
was popularly known as an affected cuss when he 
could handle anything more erudite than a nasal 
past participle or two in his own language, and any 
one who wanted to qualify as a humorist had to be 
able to mispronounce any word of over three syl- 
lables. 

Thus we find Mark Twain, in the selections given 
in this volume, having amusing trouble with the 
pronunciation of Michael Angelo and Leonardo da 
Vinci, expressing surprise that Michael Angelo was 
dead, picking flaws in the old master's execution 
and complaining of the use of foreign words which 
have their equivalent ''in a nobler language — 
English." 

There certainly is no harm in this school of humor, 
and it has its earnest and prosperous exponents to- 
day. In fact, a large majority of the people still 
like to have some one poke fun at the things in which 

[304] 



THE BROW-ELEVATION IN HUMOR 

they themselves are not proficient, whether it be 
pronunciation, Latin or bricklaying. 

But there is an increasingly large section of the 
reading public who, while they may not be expert 
in Latin composition, nevertheless do not think that 
a Latin word in itself is a cause for laughter. A 
French phrase thrown in now and then for metrical 
effect does not strike them as essentially an affec- 
tation, and they are willing to have references made 
to characters whose native language may not have 
been that noblest of all languages, our native tongue. 

That such a school of readers exists is proved by 
the popularity of F. P. A's verses and prose. If 
any one had told Mark Twain that a man could run 
a daily newspaper column in New York and amass 
any degree of fame through translations of the "Odes 
of Horace " into the vernacular, the veteran humor- 
ist would probably have slapped Albert Bigelow 
Paine on the back and taken the next boat for Ber- 
muda. And yet in " Something Else Again " we find 
some sixteen translations of Horace and other "furri- 
ners," exotic phrases such as " eheu fugaces " and 
" ex parte " used without making faces over them, 
and a popular exposition of highly technical verse 
forms which James Russell Lowell and Hal Long- 
fellow would have considered terrifically high-brow. 

[ 30s ] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

And yet thousands of American business men quote 
F. P. A. to thousands of other American business 
men every morning. 

Can it be said that the American people are not so 
low-brow as they like to pretend? There is a great 
deal of affectation in this homespun frame of mind, 
and many a man makes believe that he doesn't know 
things simply because no one has ever written about 
them in the American Magazine. If the truth were 
known, we are all a great deal better educated than 
we will admit, and the derisive laughter with which 
we greet signs of culture is sometimes very hollow. 
In F. P. A. we find a combination which makes it 
possible for us to admit our learning and still be 
held honorable men. It is a good sign that his fol- 
lowing is increasing. 



[306] 



LXIII 
BUSINESS LETTERS 

A TEXT-BOOK on English composition, giving 
examples of good and bad letter-writing, is 
always a mine of possibilities for one given to rumi- 
nating and with nothing in particular to do. In 
" Business Man's English " the specimen letters are 
unusually interesting. It seems almost as if the 
authors, Wallace Edgar Bartholomew and Floyd 
Hurlbut, had selected tlieir examples with a view to 
their fiction possibilities. It also seems to the reader 
as if he were opening someone else's mail. 

For instance, the following is given as a type of 
" very short letter, well placed ": 

Mr. Richard T. Green, 
Employment Department, 
Travellers' Insurance Co., 
Chicago, 111. 

Dear Mr. Green: 

The young man about whom you inquire has 
much native ability and while in our employ proved 
himself a master of office routine. 

[307] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

I regret to say, however, that he left us under 
circumstances that would not justify our recom- 
mending him to you. 

Cordially yours, C. S. THOMPSON 

Now I want to know what those '' circumstances " 
were. And in lieu of the facts, I am afraid that I 
shall have to imagine some circumstances for myself. 
Personally, I don't believe that the " young man '^ 
was to blame. Bad companions, maybe, or I 
shouldn't be at all surprised if he was shielding 
someone else, perhaps a young lady stenographer 
with whom he was in love. The more I think of it 
the more I am sure that this was the secret of the 
whole thing. You see, he was a good worker and 
had, Mr. Thompson admits, proved himself a master 
of office routine. Although Mr. Thompson doesn't 
say so, I have no doubt but that he would have been 
promoted very shortly. 

And then he fell in love with a little brown-eyed 
stenographer. You know how it is yourself. She 
had an invalid mother at home and was probably 
trying to save enough money to send her father to 
college. And whatever she did, it couldn't have 
been so very bad, for she was such a nice girl. 

Well, at any rate, it looks to me as if the young 
man, while he was arranging the pads of paper for 

[308] 



BUSINESS LETTERS 

the regular Monday morning conference, overheard 
the office-manager telling about this affair (I have 
good reason to believe that it was a matter of care- 
lessness in the payroll) and saying that he consid- 
ered the little brown-eyed girl dishonest. 

At this the young man drew himself up to his 
full height and, looking the office-manager squarely 
in the eye, said: 

" No, Mr. Hostetter; it was I who did it, and I 
will take the consequences. And I want it under- 
stood that no finger of suspicion shall be pointed 
at Agnes Fairchild, than whom no truer, sweeter 
girl ever lived! " 

" I am sorry to hear this, Ralph," said Mr. Hos- 
tetter. " You know what this means." 

" I do, sir," said Ralph, and turned to look out 
over the chimney-pots of the city, biting his under 
lip very tight. 

And on Saturday Ralph left. 

Since then he has applied at countless places for 
work, but always they have written to his old em- 
ployer, Mr. Thompson, for a reference, and have 
received a letter similar to the one given here as an 
example. Naturally, they have not felt like taking 
him on. You cannot blame them. And, in a way, 
you cannot blame Mr. Thompson. You see, Mr. 

[309] 



LOVE CONQUERS ALL 

Hostetter didn't tell Mr. Thompson all the circum- 
stances of the affair. He just said that Ralph had 
confessed to responsibility for the payroll mix-up. 
If Mr. Thompson had been there at the time I am 
sure that he would have divined that Ralph was 
shielding Miss Fairchild, for Mr. Thompson liked 
Ralph. You can see that from his letter. 

But as it stands now things are pretty black for 
the boy, and it certainly seems as if in this great 
city there ought to be some one who will give him 
a job without writing to Mr. Thompson about him. 
This department will be open as a clearing-house for 
offers of work for a young man of great native abil- 
ity and master of office routine who is just at pres- 
ent, unfortunately, unable to give any references, 
but who will, I am quite sure, justify any trust that 
may be placed in him in the future. 



[310] 



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